Books and the imagination oral history transcript : fifty years of rare books

Books and the Imagination

ERRATA

Page 86, line 20 (and throughout, see index),
for Susannah Dakin read Susanna Dakin.

Page 76, line 3, for Southwind read South Wind.

BOOKS AND THE IMAGINATION: FIFTY YEARS OF RARE BOOKS

Jake Zeitlin

Interviewed by Joel Gardner

VOLUME I

Completed under the auspices

of the

Oral History Program

University of California

Los Angeles

Copyright (c) 1980
The Regents of the University of California

This manuscript is hereby made available for research
purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript,
including the right to publication, are reserved to the
University Library of the University of California at
Los Angeles. No part of the manuscript may be quoted
for publication without the written permission of the
University Librarian of the University of California
at Los Angeles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Interview History

TAPE NUMBER: I, Side One (June 28, 1977) 1

Early years in Fort Worth--The Blatt group —
Meeting Ben Abramson: the family business —
Introduced to the excitement of bookselling —
Abramson leaves town harriedly--A glance at
Abramson 's lif e--Barbara Benson--The Cosmos
Club — Peter Molyneux--Franklin Wolf e--Meeting
Edith Motheral--Marriage — Embarking for Cali-
fornia.

TAPE NUMBER: I, Side Two (June 28, 19 77) 22

Hitchhiking to California — Job for B'nai B'rith
Messenger — Miriam Lerner--Job as gardener for
Doheny Oil--Job at Holmes Book Company — A tragic
fire and a prophetic vow — Job at May Company —
Move to Bullock 's--New friends: Phil Townsend
Hanna, Will Connell, Grace Marion Brown — Meeting
Julius Jacoby--Treatment for spot on lung — Help
in starting a business: Arthur Mayers, Odo Stade,
Jim Blake--Louis Samuel--Bill Conselman —
Publishing Whispers and Chants — Foreword by Carl
Sandburg — Approaching the Grabhorns--Meeting
Carey McWilliams — Another circle: Merle Armitage,
Lloyd Wright, Will Connell, Arthur Millier —
Opening a shop — Books from Louis Epstein.

TAPE NUMBER: II, Side One (July 26, 1977) 44

The first shop; getting the books--Jim Blake —
Louis Epstein — Importing English books — Early
staf f--Inf luence and help of Ernest Dawson —
Visit from Ernest Maggs--Cross-country selling
--Clientele--Charles Lincoln Edwards--
Influences toward the sciences--Mrs . Getz--
Buying incunabula from V^eyhe — Graphic arts
shows.

TAPE NUMBER: II, Side Two (July 26, 1977) 65

Graphic arts--Photographs — Merle Armitage —
Trip with Armitage and Arthur Millier — Through

IV

the Sierras — To San Francisco — Nevada gold
country--Visit to Erskine Scott Wood — Visit
to Robinson and Una Jeffers--A Jeffers post-
script--Redondo Beach group--A libelous novel —
Arthur Millier — The Los Angeles art world--
Millier's life — Millier as artist.

TAPE NUMBER: III, Side One (August 2, 1977) 84

Opinion--The originators--The content--First
Jake Zeitlin publications--Catalogs--Type of
books sold--Fine-press books--Printers of Los
Angeles--Ward Ritchie joins Gregg Anderson —
Origins of Primavera Press--Adobe Days .

TAPE NUMBER: III, Side Two (August 2, 1977) 106

Bruce McCallister--Grant Dahlstrom — The Rounce
and Coffin Club--Saul Marks — A Gil Bias in
California- -Move to Sixth Street--Helpers :
William Blaine Wooten, Karl Zamboni, Larry
Powell, E. Digges Graves, Fillmore Silkwood
Phipps .

TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side One (August 9, 1977) 124

Lloyd Wright's design of bookstore--Holmes Book
Company--Warren Rogers--Bunster Creeley and
Nick Kovach--Fred Lof land--Gordon Raye
Young--Jones Book Store--Parker ' s Bookstore--
The "two-generation rule"--Acadia Book Shop--
Ralph and Richard Howey--Dave Kohn and
Soldier Joe--Alice Millard.

TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side Two (August 16, 1977) 144

Keeping the business af loat--Unpleasantness in
the Alfred Leonard affair- -Drumming up stock-
holders--Move to shop at 614 West Sixth Street--
Prints and contemporary painting exhibitions —
L.A. art galleries--Stanley Rose and Mac
Gordon--Movie studio clients--Rapid Blueprint
Company--The decline of Sixth Street--Ernest
Dawson.

TAPE NUMBER: V, Side One (August 16, 1977) 164

UCLA and other academic/library clients —
Lawrence Clark Powell--Galka Scheyer and
Frieda Lawrence--Kathe Kollwitz.

TAPE NUMBER: VI [video session] (September 9, 1977) . 181

Zeitlin's personal collection--The purpose of
collecting — Da rwin--Burroughs--VJhitman- -Joseph
B lumen thai: The^ Printed Book in America — John
Steinbeck — Aldous Huxley--Pieter Brueghel
collection--Ashley Montague--Carl Sandburg and
folk songs--Early discovery: Elizabeth Madox
Roberts's The Time of Men--Rockwell Kent and
Merle Armitage--Larry Powell--Robinson Jeffers
book--Rockwell Kent; Rockwell Kentiana--Carl
Zigrosser, promoter of arts and artists--Rockwell
Kent impersonator Mike Romanoff.

TAPE NUMBER: VII, Side One (September 29, 1977) . . . 206

Reader ' s Digest articles--Charlie Ferguson and
Charlie Dunning — "Lilliputian Libraries"--
Epheraera: "Trifles Today and Treasures
Tomorrow"--Articles for Arts and Architecture,
including "Doubletalk"--Trouble with AMA and
LACMA — Jake Zeitlin Books incorporates and
moves to Carondelet--Forced to liquidate
corporation.

TAPE NUMBER: VII, Side Two (September 29, 1977) . . . 226

Liquidation — John Valentine and building from
scratch--Chemurgic Corporation library —
Josephine Ver Brugge--Zeitlin Periodicals--
Zeitlin and Ver Brugge merge.

[second part] (October 4, 1977) 237

Edward Dickson — CIO involvement and Democratic
activity; Helen Gahagan Douglas--Relocation to
the Red Barn on La Cienega--Susannah Dakin.

TAPE NUMBER: VIII, Side One (October 4, 1977) .... 247

Relocating to Red Barn--Valentine--Kofoid
collection--Susannah Dakin--Zamorano Club;
policy, membership, exclusion of bookdealers--
Book Club of California--Roxburghe Club--
Grolier Club.

TAPE NUMBER: VIII, Side Two (October 4, 1977) .... 268

Grolier Club excursions.

vx

[second part] (November 30, 1977) 272

Frank Hogan builds a collection — Dr. Rosenbach;
rise and fall of a great bookdealer — Frank
Hogan 's impact on bookdealers.

TAPE NUMBER: IX, Side One (November 30, 1977) .... 287

Dr. Elmer Belt--Building the Leonardo da
Vinci collection — Kate Steinitz becomes Dr.
Belt's librarian--Attracting scholars — Donating
collection to UCLA: Belt Library of Vinciana.

TAPE NUMBER: IX, Side Two (December 13, 19 77) . . . . 30 8

Steinitz and Belt — Crossroads for Leonardo
scholars--Bern Dibner and Elmer Belt — Acquiring
the Herbert Evans collection — Association with
Bern Dibner — Presentation of Dibner 's collection
to Smithsonian.

vii

INTRODUCTION

Innumerable lives have been influenced by the iffan
generally known as Jake Zeitlin but who should be more
properly addressed as Jacob Israel Zeitlin. He was raised
in Texas but moved to Southern California as a young man.
He arrived destitute with a wife and child. VJorking at any
itinerant job he could find to support his family, he
eventually found a niche as a bookseller in a hallway on
Hope Street, close by the Los Angeles Public Library and
across from the Bible Institute.

It was there I first met the young Jake Zeitlin. I
was still in college, at Occidental. An English professor,
a dynamic and eccentric poet by the name of Carlyle Ferren
Maclntyre, often took me browsing on the booksellers' row
of those days in 1927 or 1928 on West Sixth Street. He
would pick up stacks of books for which he would haggle
and bargain. As I watched his antics, he would spy a
particular book and point it out to me saying, "You must
read that. Buy it." Thus, my library began to be formed.

We usually sneaked around the corner to peek into
the smallest of the bookstores of the area. It had once
been the hall entrance to a stairway leading up to some
abandoned rooms. It was in this five- or six-foot-wide
area that Jake established his first bookshop. We usually
didn't buy much there. Maclntyre was interested in bargains.

Vlll

reading copies; and Jake's limited stock was made up of
rare books. But it was always worth the stop just to chat
with Jake. Thus I met this then gaunt and scraggle-
featured man who was to become not only one of my best
friends but a mentor through more than fifty years.

Los Angeles had been known as "The Queen of the Cow
Counties." Its climate was so pleasant that one's chief
objective was to enjoy it. There had been minor literary
activities in the early part of the century circulating
around Charles Lummis, but in general Southern California
was artistically and literarily barren. Jake arrived at
an opportune time. Los Angeles was just beginning to
awaken. He moved his shop around the corner on Sixth
Street to slightly larger quarters. Lloyd Wright designed
for him a charming place; Jake always had extremely
attractive shops created for himself. Wright did another
one, a few years later, down the street; and Walter Bearman
designed a perfect beauty in the old coach house of the
Earle estate on Carondolet just off Wilshire Boulevard.
Finally, he moved to his present Red Barn on La Cienega
Boulevard.

Young Jake attracted to his shop a vibrant group of
people — writers, artists, and printers, as well as book
collectors. These people congregated there not only for
the books which Jake offered them to peruse, or preferably

IX

to buy, but also to enjoy the stimulation of a "small
renaissance" enhanced by Zeitlin's enthusiasm and articu-
late leadership.

One aspect was literary. Jake's was a gathering place
for the young writers of the area. They started a maga-
zine, Opinion, "published for the sole purpose of giving
currency to pure passion and prejudices, intelligently
written on subjects of pertinency and interest. It is
inspired by no revolutionary motives, scorns all crusades
and reforms, and denies itself equally to the sophistical
attitudes of obvious poseurs. The editors welcome terse
and pointed compositions — prose and poetical--which will
be adjudged entirely from the standpoint of honesty of
their conception, the merit of their subjects, and the
competency of their development." The contributors were
all habitues of the bookshop, and included among others
Louis Adamic, Merle Armitage, Walter Arensberg, Carl
Haverlin, Phil Townsend Hanna, Carey McWilliams, W.W.
Robinson, Paul Jordan-Smith, and Lloyd Wright.

In a back corner of the shop was a small art gallery
where Jake, with foresight and taste, hung many important
shows--Edward Weston, Paul Landacre, Rockwell Kent, Marie
Laurencin, and Kathe Kolowitz — most were the first shows of
the artists' works in the West.

His impress on printing was also influential. He
induced the then premier printer in Los Angeles, Bruce

McCallister, to cooperate in the publication of a couple
of books, Los Angeles in the Sunny Seventies and Sarah
Bixby Smith's Adobe Days. This led to the formation of his
Primavera Press, one of the first publishing houses in
Los Angeles. He gave encouragement and commissions to
the young printers who were emerging in the early thirties.
He helped Grant Dahlstrom operate Arthur Ellis's Albion
handpress to produce the T^persand books. He had Saul
Marks print his catalog, The King 's Treasury of Pleasant
Books &_ Precious Manuscripts. It is possibly as handsome
a catalog as has ever been printed. But with Marks
meticulously setting it completely by hand, time elapsed;
and by the time the catalog was delivered, most of the
books had been sold. Jake also gave me my first commissions-
some pamphlets by Carl Sandburg — the first of many to
follow.

All of us are grateful for having known Jake Zeitlin.

Ward Ritchie

Los Angeles, California
December, 19 80

XI

INTERVIEW HISTORY

INTERVIEWER: Joel Gardner, Senior Editor, UCLA Oral
History Program. BA, MA, French, Tulane Univer-
sity; MA, Journalism, UCLA.

TIME AND SETTING OF INTERVIEW:

Place; Home of Jake Zeitlin, 907 North Alfred,
Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Dates: June 28, July 26, August 2, 9, 16, September
9 [video session], September 29, October 4, November
30, December 13, 1977; January 17, February 14, 21,
March 14, April 25, May 9, June 27, September 21,
19 78; September 12 [video supplement, not in trans-
script, with Carey McWilliams], 24, 1979.

Time of Day, Length of Sessions , and Total Number
of Recording Hours : Interviews took place in the
late evenings, after Mr. Zeitlin had worked a full
day at the shop or on the road, and after the inter-
viewer had dined with him and his wife, Josephine
Ver Brugge Zeitlin. Sessions were, therefore, re-
laxed and pleasant, averaging an hour to an hour
and a half in length. A total of 22 hours was
recorded.

Persons Present During Interview: Zeitlin and Gardner.
Bernard Galm, Director, Oral History Program, operated
equipment at the video session.

CONDUCT OF THE INTERVIEW:

The interviewer immersed himself in the works and
archives of Jake Zeitlin. The UCLA Library Depart-
ment of Special Collections holds many of his early
papers, catalogs, and all of his written works, as
well as those pertaining to him. Also consulted was
an earlier oral history interview conducted by the
Program which made recitation of some early bio-
graphical details in this oral history unnecessary.

The approach of the interview was biographical. The
recording began with the interviewee's early days
in Fort Worth and continued to Los Angeles through
the various incarnations of his bookselling operations-
from the small bookstore on Hope Street to the mar-
velous Red Barn on La Cienega. His relations with
photographers, artists, and the denizens of cultural

Xll

Los Angeles, in general, were explored. At the
time he participated in the sale of the Honeyman
Collection of books on the sciences to Sotheby
Parke Bernet, that collection and its disposition
were analyzed for elements common to gathering
and dispersing collections. Booksellers' assoc-
iations, local and national, were discussed, as
were Mr. Zeitlin's colleagues and competitors in
the antiquarian book trade.

Tape Number XIII, Side One, and part of Side Two
were dictated by Zeitlin in order to present a
historical summary of his fifty years of bookselling
which could in turn be used for a proposed catalog.

EDITING:

Editing was done by Deborah Young, Assistant Editor,
Oral History Program. She checked the verbatim
trasncript of the interview against the original
tape recordings and edited for punctuation, para-
graphing, correct spelling, and verification of
proper and place names. Words and phrases in-
serted by the editor have been bracketed.

Mr. Zeitlin reviewed the manuscript and approved the
edited transcript. He made minor corrections and
provided or confirmed spellings of names that had
not been verified previously. The final manuscript
remains in the same order as the original taped
material.

Joel Gardner, Senior Editor, Oral History Program,
reviewed the edited transcript before it was typed
in final form. Rebecca Andrade, Assistant Editor,
Oral History Program, prepared the index. Ward
Ritchie, a long time friend and colleague of Jake
Zeitlin, was invited to write the introduction.
Other front matter was assembled by Program staff.

SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS:

Zeitliniana at the UCLA Library comprises a vast
collection. The Department of Special Collections,
as indicated above, holds a complete collection of
works by and about the bookseller. Transcripts,
audio tapes, and video tapes pertaining to this
interview are in the University Archives and are
available under the regulations governing the use
of noncurrent records of the University. The

Xlll

Archives also houses audio and video tapes donated
to the University by the Zeitlins. These include
a video tape of the slide presentation "A Diamond
for Jake," produced by Muir Dawson on Jake Zei.tlin's
seventy-fifth birthday celebration with the Friends
of the UCLA Library; a video tape produced by Califor-
nia State University, Northridge, which details the
early days of the Red Barn and introduces friends of
the Zeitlins, including Lawrence Clark Powell; and
a video tape of Zeitlin with Carey McWilliams and
the interviewer produced by the Oral History Program
in 1979.

Records relating to the interview are in the office
of the Oral History Program.

XIV

TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
JUNE 28, 1977

GARDNER: I'd like to start out by recapitulating some
of what you already talked about, but to a degree
discussing your intellectual underpinnings and background,
especially in Fort Worth. You mentioned the group of
people that you were involved with in Fort Worth when
you were very young. The names I have are [Bertha]
Blatt, Resnick, [Morris] Greenspan, and [Aaron] Shamblum.
How did you get involved with them when you were a
teenager?

ZEITLIN: Well, of course, these particular people were
all Jewish, and they were all connected with the one
Jewish synagogue that there was in the town (it was an
Orthodox synagogue). Mrs. Blatt, for instance, was not
really religious, and certainly was in .-^o way devoted to
Orthodox Judaism. She was one of these intellectual
Jewish socialists, of which there were quite a few, who
actually were actively antireligious; they repudiated
religion as much as they could. But, of course, because
she was Jewish and she was living in a small town, she
gravitated towards the other Jews in the community. I
don't remember where she'd come from. Her husband was
a typesetter — compositor, I guess I would call hira--who
worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the composing

room. She was like so many women — much more, had much
more to give. She was a woman of considerable intellect,
she had read widely, she'd lived in a big city, and here
she was in a small town with a great deal of energy and
no outlet.

We had a small group, really a very harmless group,
of no more than seven or eight people in all, who used
to meet socially and then, about once a month on a
Sunday afternoon, would hold a meeting offering culture
to whoever wanted to come and get it in the local Hebrew
Institute. (The Hebrew Institute had a small library,
which consisted mainly of a set of [Charles William]
Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf [Harvard Classics] and a few
other books.) Somebody would undertake to give a talk
on some subject. Now, on one occasion, I think she
decided to talk about Karl Marx and the history of the
communist movement, and word got around about that, so
we were immediately labeled as a bunch of Reds. But
most of our meetings were in somebody's kitchen, or on
the hot nights on the front stoop of somebody's house.
We would often go down to the one local delicatessen
there was in town, order corned beef sandwiches, argue,
and stay until it was closing time--not any different
in that way from the big-city coffeehouse groups.
GARDNER: About how old were you at this time?

ZEITLIN: Well, I think I must have started in with these
things when I was about sixteen.
GARDNER: Were there others your age?

ZEITLIN: No. I was the youngster of the crowd. I still
can't understand how I happened to circulate as I did
and develop the friendships that I did. For one thing,
I was never self-conscious, and I must have been a
bumptious young man, because I never thought anybody
was taller than I was, so that if I heard of somebody
that was an authority on geology or botany and that I
wanted to learn something from, I would just go and
knock on their front door and then tell them I was inter-
ested, would like to talk to them. And they were all
very kind and hospitable, and lent me books, and invited
me back, and took me on field trips and so on. So I
think maybe my curiosity bump was bigger than normal,
[laughter] and as a result of that I would seek these
people out, talk to them, listen to them, and I learned.
Practically all I learned was either through reading
by myself or through these informal tutors that I sought
out.

GARDNER: Was it about the same time that you met Ben
Abramson? His role with you must have been an important
one.
ZEITLIN: Well, I guess I haven't recorded there how it

happened that I met Ben Abramson and Jerry Nedwick. My
father [Louis Zeitlin] had a business which involved
the bottling of vinegar, the manufacture of table condi-
ments, the packing of spices; and we would take these out
to the various grocery stores. First we had a salesman,
who would go around and take the orders, and then we
would make up the orders and go out and deliver them.
My brother [Sam] or I had to go on the truck with whoever
did the delivering. I had forgotten why that happened,
until my brother reminded me the other day that when
we would send out deliverymen on the trucks and they
would deliver the goods, they usually got paid cash by
the merchants; they would take the bill along. And when
they collected enough cash, they would just leave the
truck on some street corner and walk off. [laughter]
And so after a few times of that experience, why, my
father decided that either my brother or I would have to
go along and handle the cash.

My father had an understanding with the local police
that if they arrested any Jewish boys, he was to be
notified, and he would come in and find out what kind
of an offense they were being held for. And if it was
a serious offense, he'd bring a lawyer in to the thing;
but if it was a minor of f ense--most of the boys were
picked up for riding the rods, for hoboing--why , he would

just pay their fine and take them over to his place,
help them find a place (usually a boardinghouse in town)
to stay, get cleaned up, and he'd put them to work.
They'd work off the money that he'd paid out to get
them out of jail, and then they'd stay and work awhile
until they went somewhere else. Now, sometimes they
were not Jewish; sometimes they were Russians, who, strangely
enough, would get way out there in Texas, without being
able to speak a word of English. So, after a while, anybody
who spoke a strange language that the police couldn't
understand was likely to have my father called to go
and talk to them. Well, if they spoke Russian, he could
talk to them; or German, he could communicate with them.
On this particular occasion, he was called in, and
there were these two young men there who had been picked
up in the railroad yards riding the freights. One of
them was named Ben Abramson, and the other was named
Jerold Nedwick. Now, Jerry Nedwick was put to work inside
the place, washing bottles and packing the various goods
that we sold, but Ben was assigned to work on the truck
with me.

GARDNER: Now, they weren't foreign-speaking.
ZEITLIN: No, they were English-speaking. This man, Ben
Abramson, was a rather squat-looking man, a stubble of
red beard and red hair.

GARDNER: About how old?

ZEITLIN: He was in his twenties. And he wasn't very
talkative for quite a while. This big truck that I
drove had to be cranked to start--we didn't have self-
starters on trucks in those days; that was about 1919,
and I think it must have been June of 1919--and this
fellow Ben Abramson was left-handed, and he couldn't
crank the truck. So I would have to get down and crank
it. And one day I got back up beside him, and, a little
bit irritated, I said, "You know, somebody recently
published a study in which he said that left-handed
people were not as bright as right-handed people."
Well, he started off right away and gave me a lecture
on lef t-handedness. It seemed that he was very well
informed on the whole subject, how many great men had
been left-handed and so on. I was quite surprised. I
asked him more questions, and it turned out that he had
worked in a bookshop in Chicago, McClurg's bookshop,
which had the famous Saints and Sinners Corner that
Eugene Field had written about. There he had met the
great Middle Western writers of the day--people like
Sherwood Anderson; he'd seen Amy Lowell smoke a cigar.
He knew about Harriet Monroe and Poetry magazine, which
I had read about; and he knew Carl Sandburg, who was
my great idol.

GARDNER: Were you already writing poetry at this time?
ZEITLIN: Yes, I was already trying to write poetry.
I'm not sure whether I'd already won a prize. Baylor
College for Women at Waco, Texas, offered a state poetry
prize every year, and I won a first or a second prize
one year. And this, of course, immediately made me
something a little out of the ordinary among the people
in my town.

And so, of course, the fact that he knew Carl
Sandburg excited me very much. Well, every day from then
on he talked. The fact is, he was a nonstop talker.
He had a tremendous memory. He had memorized a great
many prose passages, and he had also memorized Oscar
Wilde's "Panthea," Oscar Wilde's "The Sphinx," and, of
course, Ernest Dowson's "Cynara," which was the favorite
poem of every bohemian in the English-speaking world
at that time. And, as we'd drive along the Texas
prairie in the sunset, he would recite "The Feet of the
Young Men" of Rudyard Kipling. Well, I was enchanted,
and I decided the greatest thing in the world would be
to be a bookseller.

Jerry Nedwick, who was Ben's friend, didn't act or
talk like he was interested in books or culture at all.
As soon as he could, he quit and used to sit around down
by the railroad tracks and watch the baseball games.

He and Ben lived in a roominghouse run by a Mrs. I.evine,
who had a very homely daughter [Ida]. Well, after no
more than three months, Ben suddenly announced that
he and Jerry were leaving and going back to Chicago.
To go back a little bit, the cicumstances under which
he left Chicago were kind of interesting. He was on
his way to getting married. Jerry Nedwick was his
best man. Jerry said to Ben, "Do you really want to
marry this girl?" Ben said, "No, I really don't know
why I said I would marry her. I don't think I'm ready
to get married, and I'm not sure she's the one I want
to marry," and so on. And Jerry said to Ben, "Ben, I'd
like to stop over here at a bar and get a drink, because
I think I need one to sort of prop me up when it comes
to the wedding." So they stopped at a bar, and the next
thing Ben knew he woke up in a boxcar outside Oklahoma
City. [laughter] By the time they got to Fort Worth,
Texas, they had been stripped of their tuxedos and
were wearing blue jeans with sash cords for belts. What
they did with their clothes, I don't know, unless they
hocked them for food, or may have been stripped of them
by the other hoboes on the road. Ben had evidently
been romancing the landlady's daughter in my town, so
he decided it was about time to get moving before the
daughter pressed her demands for him to marry her. Well,

they caught a freight train, went back to Chicago, and
they went into business. They opened the Argus Bookshop,
which became one of the most successful bookshops in
Chicago in its day, and Ben pi±)lished a number of
catalogs, which were entitled "Along the North Wall."
He would just stand there with a bottle of whiskey in
his hand, look at the books on the shelves, and talk
about them. And he kept a whole string of stenographers
there taking his dictation. And as they would get tired,
he'd have another stenographer come on, and the other
one would go back and transcribe her notes. He published
this whole series of catalogs, which have become quite
famous.

One interesting thing about all this was that the
landlady's daughter and her mother decided they were
going to follow this guy Ben Abramson and his friend
Jerry back to Chicago. And so one day Jerry Nedwick
came to his house, and here was Mrs. Levine and her
daughter sitting there talking to his mother. And
Jerry said to his mother, "How come they're here?"
And she said, "Why, Ben sent them to us. He said she
was your girl." The mother and daughter stayed there
in Chicago. The daughter never did get married, but the
mother met a man who became a very rich real estate
operator, and she ended up a very rich and very happy

woman. [laughter]

GARDNER: You remained friendly with him. Did you keep

up a correspondence?

ZEITLIN: We kept up a correspondence through the years.

It was quite voluminous--mostly on his part — but I never

saw him again. He was quite successful in Chicago —

he was immensely successful--but he wasn't satisfied.

He was a curious sort of an egomaniac, and he was so

successful in Chicago he thought he could conquer New

York. He sold out his business and moved there, and

he wasn't the same thing in New York as he was in Chicago.

His kind of a rough-talking bumptious way didn't suit

the New York collectors and dealers, and he had to rent

a place in a loft instead of on the street — nobody could

afford a street store in New York, even in those days —

and book people just forgot he was there. Finally, he

did so poorly that he had to give it up, and he moved

out to Lake Monhegan [and] took an old school building. His

daughter lived on the middle floor, his wife lived on

the top floor, and Ben lived on the lower floor and had

all his books there. The sad thing was that Ben was

right the first time. He shouldn't have gone back and

married the girl that Jerry had tried to shanghai him

from marrying. That was an unhappy marriage, and there

10

seems to have been a lot of friction between them over
the years. The daughter was the chief means of communi-
cation. Her name was Barbara, and she used the name of
Barbara Benson. Later it turned out that she got the
name of Benson because Ben called her in one day and
said, "You know, I've never had a son, so from now on
you are 'Benson.'" And she has continued to use that.
She has a book business--a mail-order book business--
up in Connecticut now, and she uses the business name
of Barbara Benson. She's also a very talkative, long-
winded letter writer, very interesting person and very
much like her father. And I've kept in touch with her.
I never saw her until a couple of years ago when I went
to Norwalk, Connecticut, to a meeting of the History
of Science Society; and while I was there, she and her
husband came down from Hartford and picked me up, and we
went back to New Haven and went to the Beinecke Library.
I got a very good chance to talk to her and get acquainted.
And since then, she has published a sketch of the life of
her father, more or less. And I sent her copies of all
the letters that he had written me, and she wrote me
very enthusiastically and said that she learned more about
her father from these letters than she'd ever known before.
The curious thing is that when she published the book,
she only alluded once to the fact that we had corresponded

11

all these years and that she had these letters.

So this meeting with Ben Abramson was what got me
into this rare-book business, or what might be called
my life of shame. [laughter]

GARDNER: You were in your late teens at this point. Was
there any thought of your going to college?

ZEITLIN: It was hardly possible. My family was struggling
along. My father had this business which was just barely
making a living for us, and my brother and I were needed
to help him. I got to be the salesman, my brother got to
be the manager of everything that went on in the plant,
and there just wasn't enough money. My brother left
school in the sixth grade, and he was really a much more
talented person than I was; and I think if he had had a
chance to have an education, he would have accomplished a
lot more. He was the one that they could depend on. I
wasn't a very dependable boy. I would up and disappear
at almost any time. Even at fourteen, I got up one night,
and got on a freight train, and rode off. [I] was gone for-
I think it must have been two or three months, until my
family found out where I was in Austin, Texas. I can't
account for these impulses, why I would just get up and
run away, but it certainly didn't improve my appearance
of stability or dependability with my parents. My brother,
on the other hand, was very dependable and had none of

12

these characteristics.

GARDNER: About this time, too, you got involved with
the Cosmos Club. Now, it may be described to some degree
in [previous tapes] , but again, how did you get involved
with this group?

ZEITLIN: Well, there was a man by the name of Peter
Molyneaux, a rather colorful character who was the chief
editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Peter
was a very interesting man and was sort of the intellectual
ornament of this paper, which to begin with was owned by
a Colonel Louis J. Wortham. Later on. Colonel Wortham
got himself a circulation manager by the name of Amon
Carter. Now, Amon Carter was a very resourceful character —
not above a little hanky-panky, such as hiring a gang of
distributors who would go out and throw the opposition
papers in the gutter, and harass their newsboys, and so
on. And in time Amon Carter worked himself up to being
the controlling stockholder and ultimately owned the paper [and]
became the great Mr. Fort Worth. But at the time I first
met Amon Carter, he was circulation manager for this paper.
GARDNER: How did you meet Molyneaux?

ZEITLIN: Well, I met him in a bookstore. The one book-
store that had a fairly good assortment of current books
in town was the book department of a place called The Fair;
it was part of a string owned by the Scherraerhorns . And

13

the manager of it was a man by the name of Mack Pegues.
I would go in there and look at the new books that came
in, and Peter Molyneaux would come in there, and he was
a very striking gentleman with a rather large nose (prob-
ably the result of a substantial appetite for good old
southern bourbon) , a shock of gray hair and a typical
Southern gentleman style. I met him there, and he
invited me to his house, which was where I saw the first
private library in my experience. He had read [Alfred]
Edward Newton's Amenities of Book Collecting [and Kindred
Affections] . He lent that to me, which, of course, inocu-
lated me with the virus of book collecting. And because
he was the editorial writer for the paper — the paper's
intellectual — he used to get a great many review copies
of books, and some of them he didn't care for, and he'd
pass on to me. And he would invite me to write reviews.
So I did do a few reviews there for what passed for a
book section, a book page. Well, there was another man
whom I also owed a great deal to. I did owe a great deal
to Peter Molyneaux. He was a great talker, and he loved
to instruct. And also, he and his wife had no children,
and he felt very paternal towards rae.

And then I met another man, by the name of Franklin
Wolfe. Franklin Wolfe was there working on a paper that
really was a swindle sheet. It was the Independent Oil

14

and Financial Reporter, I think it was called. It was
supposed to report the happenings in the oil fields of
Texas, but its real purpose was to build up the enthusi-
asm. . . . [phone rings; tape recorder turned off]
Wolfe was the editor of the Independent Oil and Financial
Reporter, it was called. The chief purpose of it was to
sell oil stock to a lot of New England schoolteachers.
Middle Western fanners, and small merchants all over the
country. And they used to send this out beating the
drums for certain phony oil companies. It was during the
days of Blue Sky. But Franklin Wolfe himself was a very
interesting man who worked on the Chicago Daily News . He
had been a friend of Carl Sandburg's, he had been a very
close friend of Clarence Darrow, and he had been very
active in the progressive movement and the labor movement
in California. In fact, he had been one of the original
organizers of the Llano Del Rio colony, which was headed
by a very interesting, hypnotic sort of a character by
the name of Job Harriman. His wife had been a city
councilwoman very early in the second decade of this
century in Los Angeles, and they had been very active at
the time when Job Harriman ran on the Socialist ticket
and almost became mayor of Los Angeles. He would have
been elected if it hadn't been for the [Los Angeles]
Times [Building] bombing.

15

So, of course, Franklin VJolfe was a great star to
me, and he was a delightful old gentleman, with wonderful
manners, and as gentle as a child. They didn't have any
children either, and so he encouraged me and invited me
to contribute poems and things to his paper. I would write
some poetry and some prose for his editorial page.
GARDNER: Despite the fact that it was about oil.
ZEITLIN: Yes, about oil. But he had an editorial page
which he kept full of all kinds of his own essays and
recollections and columns that he kept running. And Peter
Molyneaux, Franklin Wolfe, and I were approached by some
other people in the town — I've forgotten. One of them
was a doctor whose name I can't remember, the other one
was the head of a laboratory that manufactured vaccines
and serums, antitetanus serums and so on. Another one
was a kind of a spectacular personality, a lawyer, whose
name I can't remember; and another was a young man — a very
striking, handsome young fellow — who was a great dresser,
and as a very young man had made a tremendous amount of
money in the oil business. Somehow or another, we decided
to have a dinner club. I was then only about seventeen;
the rest of these were men, mature men, anywhere from
thirty on. And they invited me to be a member of this
Cosmos Club, they called it; they modeled it after the
Cosmos Club in Washington, but it was hardly comparable.

16

And we would meet, I think it was, one night a month.
Later we invited one or two other people, or they invited
one or two other people in the town, and somebody would
give a paper--very much like dinner clubs of the same sort.
But once some member would prepare a paper on some subject
that he knew a little about — he knew a lot about very
often — and this was, of course, very exciting to me. They
all dressed in dinner jackets, but I didn't have any
dinner jackets. I was very lucky to have a clean white
shirt, but they accepted me and paid my dinner bills and
so on. And they would have good wines. I learned--the
first I ever learned about anything like good wines and
good food was with this group. We met in what then was
the best hotel in town, the Westbrook, and now when I go
past this run-down, shabby-looking little thing, I can't
imagine that this was the glamorous place, the glamorous
Westbrook Hotel, which I was so pleased to be invited to
come into with those people for a dinner with waiters,
dressed up for the occasion. They made quite a thing of
this. I don't remember how long this lasted--! t couldn't
have lasted longer than a year or two — but it, for me, was
a great experience and, of course, it set me up quite a
lot to be the young mascot, as it were, of these people
whom I looked upon as great intellectuals.
GARDNER: At this point, then, I suppose "bohemian" would

17

be the best description of you. You were a young poet.
You remained a young poet, I suppose, the rest of your
time in Fort Worth.

ZEITLIN: Yes, I suppose--you know, it's curious. . . .
Well, I published a poem or two in the local paper; I did
a review or two; I won this poetry prize; the local paper
published a feature story on me. I'm surprised that I
didn't become more conceited than I was, considering the
amount of attention I got. I seem to--I must say this
with all immodesty--! seem to have always had a knack
for getting publicity without trying.
GARDNER: How did you meet Edith Motheral?
ZEITLIN: Well, I met Edith Motheral through the sister
of a girl that I had been quite mad about, one of the
girls that I used to go swimming with down on the river,
Elizabeth Fish. I taught her to swim, and later she went
off to the University of Texas, on the swimming team
and everything; and Elizabeth Fish became quite a sophis-
ticated young woman, far beyond my limits, very quickly
after she went off to the university. Her sister, Stella,
was also a very attractive young woman; she was followed
around by a whole crowd of young men. And she got a job
at the telephone office working as a switchboard operator,
and I used to come by in the evenings to pick her up to
take her out for Chinese dinner, or just to talk and then
take her home. She was the older sister of Elizabeth,

18

whom I had a great passion for and whom I taught to swim
and who used to go swimming with me. And one night she
came down from the office. I met her at the front steps,
and she had with her this tall young woman by the name of
Edith Motheral. Well, Edith was a very striking, very
beautiful, young woman, and she wrote poetry. It turned
out she did very good lyrical poetry, and, my, I fell
head over heels. And the first thing you know, we were
going swimming in the river. (That was my chief way of
courting the girls--taking them swimming, and persuading
them that the best way to swim was to swim naked on the
river at night in the moonlight.) Well, we got so we
would go swimming in the wintertime, and then build a
fire on the banks of the river, dry off, and dress. Nat-
urally, after a little while, we became quite passionately
involved, and ultimately we were sleeping together. Well,
I didn't dare tell my family. Her family was quite
receptive to me because she was a very tempestuous young
woman who had a temper and was headstrong and was un-
controllable, and about the only way she would calm down
was if I came by and took her swimming and out for a hike
in the woods. Otherwise, she was always at odds with
her father and brothers. So ultimately I commenced to
have a strong feeling that the only thing for us to do
was to get married. We went over to Dallas and got

19

married without telling my family, and then shortly
afterward the natural thing happened: she got pregnant.
She was living with her folks, and I was living with
my family, and my family didn't know that we were married.
GARDNER: She was not Jewish, I assume.
ZEITLIN: No, she was not Jewish. My family was very
strongly Orthodox, and it was a terrible shock, of course,
when they ultimately found out. And finally, I went to
my friend Franklin Wolfe and said, "I'm married to this
girl, Edith" — he had met her; I'd taken her over to visit
him and his wife and to have dinner--"and she's pregnant,
and I just can't stand to tell my family, and we've got
to go away." And he said, "Well, where would you go?"
And I said, "Well, I thought maybe I'd go to Chicago and
get a job with my friend Ben Abramson in his bookshop.
I don't know any other place." And he said, "Well, why
not California?" He said, "I've got some friends out
there, the Calverts, and I'd think they'd put you up for
a while. And I've got a friend who is the advertising
manager, the public relations manager, of a cafeteria
there. Boos Brothers, which is a big going outfit." And
he said, "You could go out there." So I sent her out on
the train to California, and she wrote back that the
Calverts had been very nice to her and had taken her into
their house. And then one day I just walked out of the

20

place, left a note saying I was going to California,
and hitchhiked. Franklin Wolfe lent me about twenty-
five dollars, and I started hiking, and I hitchhiked
across from Texas to California.

GARDNER: That looks like a good place to end this side
of the tape.
ZEITLIN: Yes.

21

TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
JUNE 28, 1977

GARDNER: Now, you're leaving Fort Worth for Los Angeles.
ZEITLIN: Yes. I think this must have been in April of
1925, and as I said, I started out to hitchhike. I
remember walking along the road crossing Pease River,
which for me had great romantic appeal because it was
the river named in a song that Carl Sandburg used to
sing called "The Buffalo Skinners." "'Tis now we cross
Pease River, / And homeward we are bound, / And no more
in that goddamn country / Will ever we be found." A
very gory western ballad. Then I stopped in Clarendon,
Texas, to see the man who managed the Wagner Ranch prop-
erties, whose name I can't remember right now [Bob Moore],
but he was known then as a great amateur ornithologist.
And I stopped to see him, and he was very hospitable to
me--fed me; and I went on ray way and crossed over into
Arizona. I think I went up by way of Roswell, New Mexico.
I remember going through Gallup — almost got mugged by
some tramps in the railroad yards in Gallup. The only
thing is, they were talking Yiddish because they thought
I didn't understand it, and they were going to get me
off into a boxcar and take whatever money I had and my
shoes. So when I answered them in Yiddish, they were

22

kind of surprised, and I got away from them.

Well, I think it must have taken two weeks for me
to get across. I picked up rides as I went along; I
walked long distances, crossed the desert; I got hungry.
I'm not clear how I got across the Mojave; I think I
hitchhiked a ride which took me across most of the Mojave
into Daggett. In Daggett I had fifteen cents, and at -
the Chinese restaurant all I could get was a slice of
bread for a nickel. And a man selling dairy products —
cheese, milk, and other things--came along in his truck,
and I asked him for a ride, and he gave me a ride, and
we crossed over into lush, green California. And it
certainly did look like paradise to me after that long,
parched desert. We came down into Los Angeles, and I
finally found my way to the house of the Calverts with
a dime in my pocket. [laughter]
GAFIDNER: Down to the last dime.

ZEITLIN: I arrived here with ten cents and a pregnant
wife and no job. These people [the Calverts], I found,
were very poor and hardly had room for a bed in one small
room in their house, so that of course we couldn't go
on staying there, and I started looking for a job. How
I came to get a job for a local Jewish paper [B'nai
B'rith Messenger] , I don't know; but I remember a man by
the name of Joe Cummings who said, "Go out and interview

23

Marco Nevvroark. We're going to do a series about the
history of the Jews of Los Angeles, and this is your
first assignment." So I went and called on this man,
Marco Newmark, and we got to talking. He was very friendly.
And when he got through talking, I went back to the paper,
and I said, "You know, I don't know a damn thing about
California history. I wouldn't know where to start to do
a story about this man. And unless you can give me some
time to do some reading up on this, I can't get you a
story." The guy said, "Well, I'm sorry, but you're fired."
I think he gave me five dollars, and off I went.

I guess then I must have got the job at Boos Brothers
Cafeteria, where I got fired for eating an orange.
GARDNER: A wonderful story.

ZEITLIN: A friend of the Calverts was a woman by the
name of Miriam Lerner. Miriam was a very interesting
woman who owned a house up in the hills at the end of
Echo Park Avenue, close to what was then the Edendale
Station, where the Red Cars stopped. She was a girlfriend
of Edward Weston's, and she had been a model for a number
of his photographs. She'd been very active in the Young
People's Socialist League in Los Angeles. And she was
E. L. Doheny's secretary, which was kind of a curious
anomaly, but E. L. Doheny was pathetically dependent on
her, and she was, of course, very close-mouthed, very

24

loyal. No matter what her personal views were, she never
in any way let that interfere with doing her job for
Doheny. And she ultimately decided she wasn't going to
be a secretary for the rest of her life. She went off
to Europe and was secretary to Frank Harris in Nice and
helped, I think, with the writing of M^ Life and Loves .
She ultimately came back to this country and worked for
[Richard J.] Walsh, who was the husband of Pearl Buck.
She was the editorial assistant for his publishing company,
John Day and Company, and she helped edit Asia magazine.
Ultimately she came back here to California. But that
time, when she was Doheny ' s secretary, my friend Mellie
Calvert spoke to Miriam Lerner and told her about me, and
Miriam Lerner got me a job driving a gardener's truck
for E. L. Doheny 's oil company. My job was to drive this
truck and help mow the lawns of all of the oil stations
all over Southern California. I got a marvelous orien-
tation because from Santa Monica almost to San Bernardino,
and from San Pedro as far as Burbank, I would drive this
truck with this gang and trim the lawns. One of my jobs,
of course, was to load the truck every morning with
fertilizer, so that I was always covered with this brown
fertilizer dust when I would come home. . . .

By that time, Edith and I had found an apartment —
an apartment house on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood. It was

25

called the St. Katherine Apartments, and it was run by
one of the meanest women in the world. In return for
the rent of this tiny apartment, it was Edith's job to
do all the slavey work in this apartment house--all the
cleaning.

GARDNER: She had had your child by then, I assiame.
ZEITLIN: No. Yes, she'd had our child by then. . . .
No, the child was on the way.
GARDNER: She was still pregnant.

ZEITLIN: Yes. When I would come home, this woman said,
"You can't have your husband coming in the front door
covered with all that smelly fertilizer. He's going to
have to come in the back door." And Edith and I said to
her, "We're not used to going into back doors, and we're
not going into back doors," so she fired Edith, and we
had to leave and find a place to live. So we rented a
little house out on what now is part of the grounds of
University of Southern California. And I got a job.
I went to see Holmes--Norman Holmes--of Holmes Book
Company. And I think I have covered that.
GARDNER: I think that story is in there, right.
ZEITLIN: Yes. That was my first job in the bookshop
in Southern California. I lasted, I think, about three
weeks and then was fired for incompetence. And the night
I got fired, Saturday night, I went home in tears. We

26

paid the rent, which had been overdue, [and] bought some gro-
ceries. I had a friend living with ine--one of the crowd
that had come out from Texas- — a man by the name of Bates
Walter Booth. He was sick at the time; he lived in this
little house, in one room. And the next morning, by
God, the house burned down. Well, we couldn't do anything
but laugh — it was too tragic to do anything but laugh
about — and we stood out, fought the flames, and laughed.
That evening, there was part of the house still standing,
and the rafters were opened to the sky. We had some food
left, and we made a meal, [and] sat down with candles. My
friend Bates said, "Well, Jake, I guess we've had it.
We're licked. I think the best thing to do is to get
in touch with our folks back in Texas, and they'll send
us money, and we can all come home." And I said, "No.
I'm gonna have the best bookshop in Los Angeles someday."
GARDNER: Ah, you didn't really say that.
ZEITLIN: Yes I did. Absolutely true. I said, "It's
going to have the finest rare books in it; it's going
to have hangings on the walls; it's going to have Oriental
rugs on the floor; and I'm going to have Rembrandt etchings [and]
Dlirer prints in it. And I'm going to stay here, by God,
till I get it." I must say, that like a lot of things
when you're young and you don't know what's ahead of you,
you've got a lot of spunk and optimism — and it's a good

27

thing. [laughter]

GARDNER: Apparently at that time that's about all you
had, was your spunk and optimism.

ZEITLIN: Yes. We were all broke, and that night we
slept in the attic of a neighbor's house. The next
morning we went out to some distant relatives of Edith's
that she had found out here. (South Los Angeles — not
Compton, but something like that. It may have been
Compton.) And we stayed there. The next day I went
into the May Company and went to the woman in charge of
the book department, a woman by the name of May Perks.
May didn't look like much, but she was a very smart woman;
and she also was a very sympathetic and good-hearted
person. They didn't have much of a book department.
As I look back on it now, I hardly see how it could have
been called a book department, but it was. And I told
her that I was a bookseller, that I'd had experience.
I'd worked for Holmes, and I had worked in Texas for a
few weeks in the book department of The Fair before I
came out here, and I needed the job. And she said, "Well,
go down and see the employment manager. I'll call him
up and tell him that I'd like to have you in my department.
And the next day, I went to work in her book department.
Well, she was a very smart woman. She was the first
person to get the idea of products connected with the

28

movie stars. And she developed all of the Shirley
Temple products--Shirley Temple dolls, books, and so on--
and she ended up a very rich woman.

I was there, I suppose, about a month, but I could
see I was selling more books than anybody in the place.
I could walk up to people and talk to them, and I knew
the techniques of selling, which I'd learned partly in
working in my father's business; so I was doing very
well in terms of sales compared to the other people in
the department. But I wanted to be in a place where
there were better books, and at that time, one of the
better book departments in town was in Bullock's. I
went over there, and there was a kind of a burly, feisty
woman there, very stern, by the name of June Cleveland.
I think I've talked about her in some of the other
things.

GARDNER: That was where you made your first . . .
ZEITLIN: I told her that I was working at the May
Company, but that I wanted to do better, and I wanted
to sell better books, and asked if she would give me a
job. So she did give me a job there, and I worked there
for about a year, and that gave me not only the opportu-
nity to sell books, but also to meet a lot of people
who became very important friends to me.
GARDNER: Right — some of whom were mentioned in that

29

first part, Mrs. [Milton] Getz, for example.

ZEITLIN: Well, no, [not] Mrs. Getz. I didn't meet [her] until

after I had gone off on my own.

GARDNER: Oh, I see.

ZEITLIN: The people I met there were Will Connell and

Phil Townsend Hanna and Maurice Warshaw.

GARDNER: Did you meet them through that? There's an

area of confusion in my own mind. I'll try to clarify

it. Is this now simultaneous to your having Whispers

and Chants published, and having done the interview with

Carey McWilliams and so on?

ZEITLIN: Carey McWilliams came to see me before I met

any of these other people.

GARDNER: So, in other words, you had the book of poems

published then, or at least about to be published.

ZEITLIN: Well, this is kind of confused. I was working

in Bullock's book department. I hadn't had a book of

poems published. And the first person that came in to

the department that I met was this fellow Phil Townsend

Hanna. He was interested in books; he was interested

in Southwestern history. He was kind of a dandy in his

dress, and later organized the Wine and Food Society

here. He came in, and I started to wait on him and talk

to him, and we got acquainted. And he was commencing to

edit a magazine called Touring Topics, which was the

30

forerunner of Westways. It was the magazine of the
Automobile Club of Southern California. And after he'd
come in, he brought in Will Connell. Will Connell had
some friends--one of them was a young woman artist by
the name of Grace Marion Brown, a very striking, very
fine young woman. And her boyfriend was a fellow by the
name of Louis Samuel, who was the business manager for
Ramon Novarro. He had gone to school with Ramon Novarro,
and then he became the business manager. And these
people sort of took me up. They invited me to their
houses, and pretty soon we had quite a circle going.
That was the beginning of a circle which later published
a magazine called Opinion. But I met all these people
there through Bullock's.

One man that came in one day was Julius Jacoby.
He owned a wholesale men ' s-accessory business; he had
the franchise for BVDs for Southern California. And
somehow or another we started to talking, and he became
interested in me. And then one day Carl Sandburg came
to town. Well, Sandburg looked me up, and he said, "I'm
going out to give a lecture in Beverly Hills at Mrs.
May's house. They're paying me to give a lecture there."
This was one of these cultural circles of the Jewish
patricians of this town. I went with Sandburg, and this
man Jacoby was there. The fact that I'd come with Sandburg,

31

I think, impressed him very much, so in a few days he
came back into Bullock's and said, "How did you happen
to be there with Sandburg?" And I said, "Well, I knew
Sandburg in Texas. I met him there, and we've exchanged
some correspondence. He asked me to come out with him."
And Sandburg also, by that time, had published his American
Songbag, in which he had a number of songs that I had
given him when I met him in Texas. So I think this fas-
cinated Jacoby. Anyhow, he said, "What can I do for you?
Is there anything I can do for you?" Well, I said, "Quite
frankly what I need right now is a doctor. I need to
go and see a doctor because I'm having trouble. I'm
losing weight, and I'm coughing, and so on." And he
said, "Fine, we'll just fix that up." He arranged for
me to see a Dr. Richmond Ware, who in later years became
a very close friend. Richmond Ware was the nephew of
Dr. VJalter Jarvis Barlow, who founded the Barlow Sani-
tarium. And Richmond Ware looked me over, and then he
reported back to Jacoby and to me that what I needed was
to go into a sanitarium for a while: I had a spot on
my lung. And, of course, I had a wife and a child; I
had no money-- [I] was getting twenty-seven dollars a week.
And I said to Jacoby there's no way I could quit work.
He said, "Don't you worry about that. We'll take care
of that." At that time the Jewish community here was

32

headed up by a very fine man by the name of George
Moschbacher, who was the father-in-law of George Behrendt.
George Behrendt later was the father-in-law of Olive
Behrendt, who is now active in [the] Hollywood Bowl and a lot
of other things locally. Moschbacher said, "Don't you
worry. We'll take care of you. We'll provide the money
for your wife and child. We'll give her an allowance
enough so that she can live off of it, and we'll pay for
your expenses at the Barlow Sanitarium." And then I
asked Bullock's if I could leave, and I went out to Barlow
Sanitarium. I wasn't there very long--I suppose about
seven weeks in all — but it was a very interesting seven
weeks.

While I was there, I realized that I couldn't go
back to work in the book department at Bullock's. One
day a man by the name of Arthur Mayers came to see me,
and he said, "You know, we've got a printing company,
and I am interested in knowing what you're going to do
with yourself and whether we can help you in any way.
What do you plan to do?" And I said, "Well, frankly,
I think the best thing I could do would be to start a
business of my own selling books." And he said, "How
would you do that?" And I said, "Well, I've put together
the names and addresses of all the people that I sold books
to when I was in Bullock's, and I think they're friends

33

of mine and would probably buy from me if I went to see
them. I know a man by the name of Odo Stade, who is the
manager of the Hollywood Book Store, and I think he would
let me have books to deliver to my customers and give me
a discount off of them." And so Arthxir Mayers said,
"All right, we'll print you some business cards and some
stationery. "

Before that, while I was at Bullock's, I had met a
man by the name of Jim Blake, who was the western repre-
sentative for Harper Brothers. I'd actually met him
back in Texas--and I don't know whether in the course of
this previous tape* I told the story of the princess from
the Pecos.

GARDNER: That was the . . .
ZEITLIN: Beatrice Molyneaux.
GARDNER: Yes, you did.

ZEITLIN: Well, that's how I happened to meet Jim Blake.
And Blake had — I'd met him again when I was working at
Bullock's; and while I was in this sanitarium, he arranged
to have a book a week sent out to me. And one of the
books he sent me was Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, just
about the worst book a man could read when he was in a
sanitarium, [laughter] but it made a tremendous impression
on me. Later I had the opportunity of meeting Thomas

* See Interview History — ed.

34

Mann, getting him to autograph my copy of The Magic
Mountain, and telling him the story of how I'd gone
through all the experiences of his characters. And he
told me that this book had grown out of his experiences
while he was in a sanitarium in Switzerland.
GARDNER: Well, how do we dovetail back now to Carey
McWilliams and the poetry?

ZEITLIN: Oh, yes, I think we can do that. When I got
out of the sanitarium. ... I don't know whether I
mentioned it; I just wanted to say a word or two about
the sanitarium. While I was there, we started a little
paper called The Temp-stick. There was a fellow by the
name of Karyl Marker, who was an actor, a very fine-look-
ing fellow, and he had been quite a success in the local
little theater [and] had performed in some of the early pre-
sentations of Eugene O'Neill here, and he and I became
fast friends. The other man I met there was a man by
the name of Sigurd Varian. Sigurd Varian had been a
flier. He had developed TB . He had been fired from his
job as a pilot on commercial airlines in this country,
so he went down to South America. And there he was
flying very high altitudes over the Andes, and of course
the first thing he knew he was hemorrhaging, and he had
to come back to the United States [and nov;] v/as in this sanitarium,
Sigurd Varian and his brother were the founders of the

35

Varian Associates.
GARDNER: Oh, my.

ZEITLIN: No one could have guessed this by the looks of
the fellow that was there in that sanitarium at that time.
And he and I and Marker used to play chess, and we sort
of created a little circle. Right away we generated more
excitement than the people in the sanitarium wanted, and
they told me that I couldn't stay any longer because the
patients were not supposed to be getting excited by all
the things that Marker and Varian and I were doing. So
that was mainly why I was dismissed. They also felt that
I didn't have a serious infection, that it was arrested,
and the best thing to do was to let me go out and go to
work. So I went back to my house at 1623 Landa Street,
which was down a dirt road--without a telephone — and I
took my little pack of cards, and I started calling on
the people that I had sold books to when I worked for
Bullock's. I said, "Now, if you are buying books, tell
me what you want, and I'll get them for you. They won't
cost you any more, and I'll make a little profit." The
first order I got was for twenty-seven dollars' worth
of books, and I went to see Odo Stade at the Hollywood
Book Store. He gave me the books at one- third off, which
was his cost, and I took them out. I borrowed eighteen
dollars to pay Stade for the books, took them out and

36

collected the twenty-seven dollars, and I had nine dollars
profit. Now, the people who really bolstered me up then
were Louis Samuel and Grace Marion Brown, who were living
together. They bought books from me. And a fellow by
the name of William Conselman--Bill Conselman and his
wife [Mina] — he was doing very well indeed as a writer
at Twentieth Century-Fox, or Fox Studios, as they were
called then, and he had started a comic strip called "Ella
Cinders." And very soon he was zooming up, making a great
deal of money, and they took practically any book I would
bring to them. Soon I had a little chain of people that
I could go to once a week or so with a pack of books, and
they took most of what I brought them. Jim Blake got me
a line of credit with some of the publishers, and I started
writing circular letters — direct mail--to my little list,
promoting some of the books that these publishers were
bringing out; just using the copy on their lists. And
this brought me mail orders.

I suppose that now, as I look on it, I'm surprised
at all of the different things I did, [and] the fact that I
had the gumption to do them. Well, I had collected some
of my poems, and I wrote to Carl Sandburg and asked him
if he'd do a foreword. He wasn't really too enthusiastic
about this, but my friend Frank Wolfe wrote to him and
said, "You know, Carl, it would be a great boost to Jake,

37

and you would do him a lot of good, if you would write a
foreword." So Carl wrote a very nice brief foreword. It
was a kind of a noncommittal thing, saying that if I kept
on I might write some good poetry someday.
GARDNER: Oh, it's much more positive than that, but that
does paraphrase it in a way.

ZEITLIN: And I got Louis Samuel — he said, "I'll put up
the money to publish your book of poetry. Let's go up
to San Francisco and see the Grabhorn Press." Well, we
didn't go to see the Grabhorns, we went to see Gelber and
Lilienthal, which was a bookselling firm in San Francisco.
It was a very fine firm, selling rare books and first
editions, and the financial backer of the firm was Ted
Lilienthal, one of the fine families of San Francisco.
And Leon Gelber had worked in the book department of the
White House, or the City of Paris, up in San Francisco,
and had learned the bookselling game. So Gelber was the
bookman, and Lilienthal was the backer. And they had a
publishing imprint; they called it the Lantern Press.
So we went to see them, and Louis Samuel bought quite a
few books from them, which buttered them up very nicely.
And he said to them that he would like to get them to be
the publishers for a book of poems if we could get the
Grabhorns to print it. So they said, "Of course." They
introduced us to the Grabhorns, and I remember that not

38

only did I meet Ed Grabhorn, but I met Erskine Scott Wood,
who was one of the great men of his time. And Ted Lilien-
thal and Sara Bard Field and Erskine Scott Wood all took
me to dinner at Coppa ' s in the Alley, which was a great
Italian restaurant--a sort of bohemian gathering place —
the walls of which had been decorated by Maynard Dixon.
It was San Francisco's boheraia. And I had lunch there;
my, I was bug-eyed. And I came back down to Los Angeles,
and I got the Grabhorns to put out a little circular on
the book, so that by the time the book was out I'd circu-
larized all the people I knew and all the people that
were buying books from me and everybody else I could think
of, and had enough orders to pay for the printing of the
book and pay back my friend Louis Samuel for backing it.
And when it came out, it was reviewed extravagantly in
the Times here, and it gave me a kind of a little name.
And Carey McWilliams looked me up. At that time Carey
McWilliams was in law school at USC, and he was part time
doing stories, personal interviews, and so on for a maga-
zine called Saturday Night. He called me up and came out
one evening to my shack down on this dirt road at the
north end of Echo Park Avenue, spent the evening with me,
and did a story about me.

GARDNER: Now, that opened up another circle, didn't it?
Or it seems to have.

39

ZEITLIN: Well. . . .

GARDNER: I'm thinking of Merle Armitage, Lloyd Wright,
and so on.

ZEITLIN: Well, these people all were part of the Will
Connell circle--in one way, as soon as I opened a shop,
I started introducing these people to each other.
GARDNER: I see. So you were really the locus, then.
ZEITLIN: Well, in a way. Will Connell was very much a
friend of all these people. Merle Armitage was the man-
ager of the Los Angeles Opera Company, and Arthur Millier
was the art editor of the Los Angeles Times, and all
these people more or less clustered at my shop. And
then we would have one of the more affluent ones--like
Bill Conselman would give parties. And this grew into
a rather wide circle. It included Lloyd Wright, the
son of Frank Lloyd Wright; and it included Lawrence
Tibbett, who in those days was a very famous opera singer.
And whenever somebody interesting would come to town,
we'd rope them in. We had Louis Untermeyer one evening,
and Lewis Mumford. And the routine was usually they would
come into the shop, then I would take them over to Will
Connell, and Will would pose them and shoot these old-
fashioned, cabinet-type photographs of them. Then we
would all go to dinner to a French restaurant on West
Sixth Street, Rene and Jean. The food was — I think dinner

40

cost seventy-five cents, and a bottle of wine cost another

fifty cents, and we would then gather at my shop and talk

and make a lot of noise and argue and generally have a

hell of a good time.

GARDNER: Well, that gets us ahead of the game a little

bit. I should probably double back and get you into the

shop. Now, here you are toting your satchel around from

place to place. What was it that gave you the impetus

to settle down in a store?

ZEITLIN: Well, that also grew out of this circle of

people. Lloyd Wright was one of the people in this circle,

and Lloyd said, "Jake, you know you just can't go on this

way dragging this heavy satchel of books"--he would see

me dragging this book bag around--"and you know, you're

going to have to start a bookshop." So I said, "Oh, that's

very good, but you know I haven't got any money to start a

bookshop with, and I haven't got any stock. I'm doing

business out of other people's stocks." And he said, "Well,

we'll find a place. We'll find a way to do it." So we

went downtown, started looking around, and on the corner

of Sixth and Hope Street, there was a T. J. Lawrence Real Estate

Company, and they had a back doorway; this was about twelve

feet deep and about eight feet wide. Lloyd said, "Why

don't we ask those people if they would rent us that with

the idea of your putting a bookshop in it." So we went

41

and talked to Mr. Lawrence, and I told him what I wanted
to do, and he said, "All right, I'll do it." I said,
"How much will you charge me?" And he said, "Thirty-five
dollars a month." [laughter]

So then Lloyd drew up the plans for this shop,
and it included a lot of cabinet work. All the bookcases
and the tables and everything were to be prefabricated
and then just brought in and put together and stained.
And I went again to my friend Julius Jacoby and told
him what I wanted to do, and he said, "Well, go out and
see a man by the name of Bob Raphael. They've got a
cabinet-making plant that's called Southern California
Hardwood Company, and they put in store fixtures and
things. Take him your blueprints and tell him I sent
you. I'll call him up." So I went to see Mr. Raphael,
and he looked them over. He said, "Well, it will cost
you about $500, and you can pay me fifty dollars a month."
GARDNER: There you are for eighty-five dollars a month.
ZEITLIN: Yes. Then I went to Louis Epstein, who had a
bookshop on West Sixth Street. Louis, as you remember,
had the Acadia Book Shop. One day a man by the name of
[Ralph] Howey came in and said, "Will you take"--I think
it was — "$1,600 for your bookshop?" And Louis said yes.
So he walked out of the store, gave the man the key, and
he was at loose ends. So he would come to see me, and

42

he and I would go out looking for books together. And

I told him about this, the fact I didn't have any books

on the shelf — and Louis had already started accumulating

stock for another bookshop. So he said to me, "I'll

lend you some books. I'll let you have some to put on

your shelves, but when I start my own shop I want back

anything that you haven't sold." So I started with

books that Louis lent me, with a few that I was able to

buy, and with some books out of the collections of some

of my other friends [which] they didn't want anymore; and they

said, "Take them and put them on your shelf." So. And

that was the way I started my bookshop.

43

TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
JULY 26, 1977

GARDNER: As I showed you in the outline, number I is
bookselling and letter A is early strategies of buying
and selling, so I think you might begin talking about
your perspective on the book business when you went into
it--what you had in mind to sell, what you had to sell,
and so forth. Let me intersperse here, when you finished
last time, you mentioned Louis Epstein's giving you the
stock . . .
ZEITLIN: Some stock.

GARDNER: ... to open the first store. I thought that
might be a good point to begin.

ZEITLIN: Well, it was not only Louis Epstein but several
other people who lent me books so that I could fill my
shelves. For instance, Louis Samuel let me have quite
a few books, and there must have been others whose names
I've forgotten now. I really started with the encourage-
ment of a few friends. Some of them were in the book
trade, and some were not. In the book trade there was
Jim Blake, who represented Harper and Brothers and whom
I'd met originally in Texas in a very peculiar way. Blake
had been a bookseller in San Francisco many years ago; he
had been actually a partner of Newbegin's and had started
a bookshop of his own, and had failed, but had really

44

found his best medium as being a publisher's representative.
And I'm sure that there was no one ever in the book trade
who performed the wonderful function he did, had the great
role that he did, with all of the booksellers, the book
clerks, the book collectors and authors, that he did. He
seemed to attract friends everywhere he went, and he seemed
to spend more of his time doing things for friends than
he did selling books. Every bookseller saved his problems
and his troubles for Jim Blake to come around so that they
could unload onto his ample shoulders and get his advice
and get his help. And he was very willing and eager to
help, and I have an idea that he must have lent thousands
of dollars to indigent booksellers and book clerks in
guaranteed credit. As an example, when I first left
Bullock's in the spring of 1927 and went into Barlow
Sanitarium, Jim Blake arranged for one of the bookstores
in Los Angeles to send me a book a week so that I would
have something interesting to read, and I must say that
it gave me a great sense of having a friend in the outside
world at a time when I had very few. Among the books
which he arranged to send to me was Thomas Mann's Magic
Mountain --hardly the book to read while you're in a TB
sanitarium. But certainly I had the time and leisure to
read it, which I have never had since.

Jim Blake, when I told him that I was going to start

45

up on my own, suggested that I get out some letters to
possible customers, and he arranged with his publishing
house and several other publishing houses to guarantee
my credit to a reasonable extent, so that I could write
a letter promoting a book and then be sure of being
able to supply it if I had any customers. And among the
first books that I wrote a letter about, promoted, was
Angel' s Flight, by Don Ryan, one of the very good early
books about Los Angeles, the Los Angeles newspaper world,
and the world of cranks and religious freaks. I had a
mailing list made up primarily of the people who had
bought books from me when I was at Bullock's — I had
managed to put together a card file of their names and
addresses — and in addition I was furnished with lists of
names by friends; so I had perhaps a couple of hundred
names that I could send out mailings to. And as I look
back, I think I can say without undue modesty that they
were very good letters. It's surprising what good results
I got from them. It wasn't enough, however, to really
make any money. What it did mainly was to bring me to
the attention of quite a few people --100 people or more
around town --so that my name was recognizable.

I had a great deal of help, and I can never stop
remembering that. There were people who went out of their
way to buy books from me who I am sure really didn't want

46

them. There were people who gave me credit, like Odo
Stade, who was the manager of Hollywood Book Store,
who gave me a [one-] third discount on books, on which I am
sure, in many cases, he didn't have that much net profit.
GARDNER: To what do you ascribe all the generosity?
ZEITLIN: I have no idea, except that I was young, enthu-
siastic, innocent, and eager.

GARDNER: And all those other Horatio Alger adjectives.
ZEITLIN: Yes, all the other Horatio Alger adjectives.
I think that the fact that I published in 1927 this book
of poems with an introduction by Carl Sandburg must have
given people the idea that I was a promising young poet.
It was reviewed in the L.A. Times by Paul Jordan-Smith,
who became a good friend of mine very early. And this,
I think, gave me a certain standing, a certain distinction,
GARDNER: You mentioned also, after telling that Louis
Epstein had given you the books, that there was an inter-
esting story having to do with his wanting them back.
ZEITLIN: Well, at the time Louis Epstein lent me these
books, he had sold the bookshop which he had on West
Sixth Street — the Acadia Book Shop — to the Howey brothers,
and he set out immediately going around and buying up
books. So pretty soon he had a roomful of old books.
He would go to the Salvation Army and the Goodwill, the
other thrift shops, and go through their books, and pick

47

out the reasonably good ones, and buy them, and just
stow 'em away. He also learned about the auction
houses and taught the auctioneers that they could get
more than ten cents a volume for their books when they
put them up in lots, and so they very often would ac-
cumulate their books and let Louis Epstein have them at
a knockdown price, rather than put them out at auction
at the mercy of the merciless public. In time, the auction
houses became a very good source of books for Louis.

For some months after I started, he continued to
accumulate books, and then, after a while, he found a
place of business over on Eighth Street [and] decided to open
up again. So he came to me and said he wanted his books,
the ones that I hadn't sold and accounted for. And I
said, "Louis, you can't have those books because if you
do my shelves will be empty." This was all very good-
natured; neither one of us got mad. And I finally turned
over to him what books were still unsold. But he's
always made a big thing of it and a great joke that I
wouldn't give him his books back.

GARDNER: Were your interests in books similar? It would
seem to me that . . .

ZEITLIN: Well, at that time, any decent book interested
me. I had a strong interest in English literature,
contemporary English literature. And I remember I started

48

in buying from a firm in London by the name of William
H. Jackson, who were distributors. They were brokers
for publishers, and they would send me over packages
of books of the prominent authors of the day. First
they would send me lists and I would order five or ten
copies of Martin Armstrong, and A.E. Coppard, and H.E.
Bates, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the other prominent
authors of the day, so that they came to me in bundles.
And I was the only bookseller, for some reason, who was
importing these books. They were seven shillings and
six pence, and I think the average retail price was
$1.75. I think one of the things that attracted people
to me is that they learned very quickly that these
English books in fine condition--the original dust
wrappers all new — were coming in, first editions, and
that they could get them from me. And as Larry Powell
has had occasion to mention, books smell different: a

book produced in England smells differently from a book
produced in the United States, and pretty soon the place
becomes permeated with the smell of the glue and the cloth
and the ink which is used in those books. So I think
my shop, after a while, developed the odor of English
bookshops rather than the typical American bookshop,
[laughter]

Now, at that time, I had a young woman who came to
work for me. She had been a newspaper reporter on the

49

Los Angeles Record. Her name was Marjorie Butler.
Marjorie was the most versatile, capable person you could
imagine: She could type, she could use a paint brush,
she could wrap packages, and she was willing and eager.
And I actually gave her a fourth interest in the business
and later had to buy it out.

GARDNER: Would that be on Sixth Street now?
ZEITLIN: That was on Hope Street. That was at the very
beginning. Later I moved around on Sixth Street. But
we sort of grew in different directions. We were different
personalities. We sort of didn't continue to be simpatico.
There was never anything but a friendship and a business
relationship, but something didn't work. And at the same
time, a very remarkable young man by the name of William
Blaine Wooten came to work for me. Bill was a man who,
if he had continued along the lines that he was developing
when he worked for me, would have become, I think, one of
the greatest modern calligraphers and designers. He
had a very fine instinct for lettering, he knew types,
he was extremely well read, he was interested in the
whole movement of William Morris and Cobden Sanderson,
he knew good graphic arts, and he had the techniques of
lettering and binding and anything having to do with
the book arts right at his fingertips. It was he who
mounted some of my shows, and did the window cards, and

50

arranged the windows in a very tasteful manner, so that
before long I think we had a unique quality about our
place, in terms of the taste and the way that his taste
reflected the then-growing tradition. We were getting
books like the Nonesuch Press books in 1928, after they
really got going; we were buying books from Douglas
Cleverdon, who was just beginning his bookselling in
Bristol--I think we were among the earliest and the
largest customers that Cleverdon had in this country.
I remember we filled a whole window with the book on
the prints of Eric Gill which Cleverdon had published.
GARDNER: How did you know to — how did you find some of
that Cleverdon? Here you were a bookseller in Los
Angeles.

ZEITLIN: I don't know. I think that I just had the
curiosity and the interest, and that I naturally gravitated
towards that sort of thing. Where I got my models, I
can't say — I think I must have come in contact with them
even before I came out to California, but I have no
remembrance of just what I encountered which started me
off with a sense of the kind of printing and typography
that was being produced by Cleverdon, the Nonesuch Press
books. I think that together with that fact, I didn't
hesitate to write to these people and tell them, that I
liked their books, and I would like to sell them.

51

GARDNER: Did you find yourself influenced by any
other of the downtown booksellers? It seems that
even at the beginning, you're setting off in a completely
different direction.

ZEITLIN: Well, I think, of course, everybody was
influenced by and admired Ernest Dawson. Ernest Dawson
was a very generous man. He was a good-spirited man,
and he was also a tremendously energetic man who inspired
and stimulated other people. I remember that in 19 28
on Christmas day, I was in my shop because I'd come
down to get caught up on some things. I got a phone
call from Ernest Dawson. He said, "I just got in a
big shipment of books which Marks and Company" (who
were his agents in London) "bought for me, cases and
cases of incunabula." These days if somebody has four
or five incunabula, it's quite remarkable. In those
days Ernest Dawson would bring over a shipment of maybe
150 or 200 incunabula at one time. And he said, "Would
you like to come over and see them?" I went over and,
of course, here were these beautiful books in contemporary
binding, some of them chain bindings. And he said, "I've
got a lot of these here, more than I need for my shop,
and if you would like to have some of them for your
bookshop, you pick out what you would like, and you can
have them for 10 percent above my cost." He didn't need

52

to do it; he could have sold them all himself. I have
no reason--! cannot understand why he was moved to do
this, but I certainly am grateful for the fact that he
did. So I was able to take over to my shop maybe twenty
or twenty-five of these beautiful fifteenth-century
books. And when I opened after Christmas, I had something
to show people that was really outstanding — would be
distinguished today, more distinguished even I think
than then, when fifteenth-century books were being brought
over by Dawson and other booksellers--although nobody as
much as Dawson--in large quantities.

GARDNER: I read a story — and I can't recall where it
was, I'd have to shuffle through my notes, and I don't
think I will--that Maggs came over here at one point
and made contact as well.

ZEITLIN: Well, in 1928, I think it was, Ernest Maggs
came over. I had written to Maggs Brothers, and I said,
"I would like to have your catalogs, and if you need
someone, I would like to represent you in the United
States and do anything I can to show your things to people.
If you want to send them over for me to show, if you have
things that you think I can sell, I would appreciate
your giving me an opportunity." So Ernest Maggs came to
town, and he stayed at the Ambassador Hotel, and he called
me up. I came down to the hotel, and he said, "I want to

53

go out to Mrs. Getz"--who was then one of the most
important book collectors in this part of the world —
"and would you like to come with me?" So I went out.
He was very well received, and she had known me before [and]
was very nice to me. And then he went out to see Mrs.
Doheny. I don't remember that I went with him then.
He had brought along with him a collection of first
editions--The Deserted Village, Tom Jones, Gulliver' s
Travels. He had, oh, thirty or forty outstanding books,
among other things a very good copy of, as well as I
remember it, the second or third folio of Shakespeare.
And he said, "Why don't you take these? I'll leave them
with you. I don't want to take them back to England.
Sell what you can. The rest of them, we'll let you know
when we want them, where you should send them. " And I
said, "Mr. Maggs, you know, I'm not worth a cent. If
those books were to be damaged or lost, I couldn't
possibly pay for them." And he said, "Don't be foolish.
Just take them, and I'm sure that you will be responsible."
He loaded me into a taxi and sent me home with these
books, so here I was right away with a beautiful collection
of important English first editions. I never realized,
really, what an exceptional collection I had, and I
didn't know who to go to. At that time I hadn't yet
contacted William Andrews Clark. I showed them to the

54

people that came into my shop. I tried to sell some
to Mrs. Doheny, but she wasn't prepared to take them
seriously, so that instead of my selling them to her
direct, one of the New York booksellers got an order
from her for a set of Tom Jones, or something like that,
which I sent to him in New York, and he sent it back
to California.

But the same thing worked the other way around.
There were collectors in New York who wouldn't buy
from New York booksellers. I would buy from those
booksellers, quote them to the collectors in New York,
and mail them back there. That was true in the case
of a man by the name of Charles Kalbfleisch. Charles
Kalbfleisch was a stockbroker on Wall Street. His
office was a very short distance away from Byrne Hackett's
Brick Row Book Shop. Byrne Hackett didn't have a very
good reputation, unfortunately. He had a tremendous
nose for good books and was a very imaginative, creative
bookseller, but he evidently had a bit of the rogue about
him. His brother was a well-known writer of the time.
He did a book about Henry VIII. I'm trying to remember . .
GARDNER: Francis Hackett?

ZEITLIN: Francis Hackett, yes. But Byrne Hackett had
a distinguished stock of books, and he was a very brilliant
bookseller, but he unfortunately had this tendency to

55

want to play the rogue once in a while, and this got
him in bad with quite a few people. So I would order
books from Byrne Hackett, or Byrne Hackett would write
me and offer me books; I would in turn offer them to
Mr. Kalbfleisch a few doors down the street from Hackett;
Mr. Kalbfleisch would order them from me, and I would
have to have them sent out here and then sent back to
New York because I didn't want Mr. Hackett to know where
I was selling the books. And so this thing works two
ways.

There's always the glamour of distance. People seem to
feel that if you offer them something, it is as if you've
newly discovered it, that it has been buried in cellars
or attics for 100 years, or that it's been created out
of nowhere, there's a certain magic about it if it comes
from a long way off. So that I have customers here in
Los Angeles that would rather buy from dealers in New
York and London, and in some cases the books they buy
are books which these people have bought from me. And
it works the other way around. I have customers in
New York and London [and] other parts of the country that
buy books from me that they woudn't buy around the corner.
GARDNER: Early on, who did your clientele consist of?
Was it through the circle of friends that you made, or
were there a lot of people who dropped in the shop?

56

ZEITLIN: I had wonderful support from a man by the name
of Bill Conselman and his wife, Mina . If I needed money,
I could just load up a pack of books. They were mostly
interested in authors like James Branch Cabell and Theodore
Dreiser, so I'd go out to their house, and they'd feed me
and buy a couple of hundred dollars' worth of books. It
saved my solvency more than once. Then along about 1928,
Elmer Belt came in one day on the way to his office.
GARDNER: This is when you were still on Hope Street?
ZEITLIN: I was still on Hope Street, and he and his
nurse, a Miss Theil, stopped, and he was so warm and
friendly. And I remember the first book I ever sold
him. It was a great big thick book, bound in vellum,
and the title was Sepulcritum, and before long I'll
remember the author. It was a book of post mortems, a
seventeenth-century book, the first large collection of
pathological case histories that I think had ever been
put together. Bonetus was the author.

This book had been left with me by a man by the name
of Charles Lincoln Edwards. Edwards headed the department
of natural history with the Los Angeles public schools.
It was a sort of teaching museum, and he also used to go
around to the different classes and lecture. He was a
lovely, inspiring man, and his wife was a charming woman,
too. They were extremely well read people of very good

57

taste. He had been a professor at Stanford University.
He was brought out from the University of Texas, where
he taught before, by [David Starr] Jordan, who had been
hired by Stanford to form Stanford University, and put
together a staff. Charles Lincoln Edwards had then come
down here to Los Angeles and had set up this department
connected with the public schools, but finally the politics
of the public school system closed up his whole museum,
and his library, and all his lectures. There were lots
of people until very recently who used to remember Charles
Lincoln Edwards and his nature lectures. He was a very
fine man, who, among other things, published what is
probably the first American book of folk songs. It was
a collection of songs from the Bahamas, Bahama Songs and
Stories (Boston, 1895) , which, I am glad to say, I have
a copy of inscribed by him. He was quite an elderly man
when I got to know him in 1925, and he was very kind to
me. He and his wife took me into their house, encouraged
me, treated me with great consideration, talked to me
about all of the people they'd known in the world of
science. They'd known David Starr Jordan very well, [and] a
lot of other people; they were full of anecdotes, good
spirits. I think they were very sad in their later
years. They made unfortunate investments in avocado
groves in Southern California, which everybody hoped to

58

make their fortune with. They didn't go. And they had
a son who was a newspaperman and worked on the Los
Angeles Examiner. I remained friends with him after
they died.

But Charles Lincoln Edwards had accumulated a number
of good books over the years, and when I think back on
it now, I think what a pity it was that I didn't appreciate
these books more. He had bird books of Gould and Elliot;
he had very fine color-plate books of flowers. And he
turned these over to me to sell for him. And it was out
of the work that I did describing them and the research
that went with it that I developed my interest in early
science and the history of science.
GARDNER: Is that so? That was the origin.
ZEITLIN: I think that, probably more than anything else,
except of course I'd always been an avid reader of what
now would probably not be looked upon as very high grade
scientific thought. I had read Karl Pearson's Grammar
of Science, and I had read everything, every line, that
John Burroughs ever wrote. I had read everything of Jean
Henri Fabre — The Life of the Bee, The Life of the Fly,
and so on — and I still think that he is one of the most
poetic nature writers that ever lived. Of course, along
with that I read Ernest Thompson Seton, and a man by
the name of Roberts--some of the people who substituted

59

fancy for fact in their treatment of animals. But
generally, somewhere along the line, I acquired a sense
of the difference between science, the rigors of scientific
logic, and the nonscientif ic way of thinking. I think
that, really more than anything else, sort of set my
course.

GARDNER: Mrs. Getz was also one of your important
early clients, wasn't she?

ZEITLIN: Yes, she was really the client upon which I
depended most, and I think without her I would never
have gotten started as a real book seller. And it was
her friend Julius Jacoby who called me and said, "Call
up Mrs. Getz. She is collecting rare books, and she'll
buy some from you if you call her." Well, as a matter
of fact, she called me first. She called me up, and she
said she wanted a set of the [Konrad] Haebler portfolios
on incunabula, which at that time were being distributed
in this country by E. Weyhe. The whole set probably
didn't come to more than $1,000 or $1,200. Recently I
sold a set for $10,000. But I naturally didn't have
that kind of money, and I knew that Weyhe wouldn't give
me credit, so I called up Mr. Jacoby and I said, "Your
friend Mrs. Getz has given me an order for these books,
and I haven't got any money to buy them with. How am I
going to supply them if I can't get the money?" And he

60

said, "Go down to the Union Bank and ask for Mr. Joe
Lippman." Well, it happened that Mrs. Getz's husband
was the vice-president of the Union Bank. His name was
Milton Getz. Her father was Kaspare Cohn, who had
founded the Union Bank. But of course, Mrs. Getz didn't
want them to know that she was buying rare books--at
that clip, anyway. It wasn't good for your business
associates to know that you were indulging in luxuries
like that. Her brother-in-law, Ben Meyer, was the
president of the bank also. So I went to Joe Lippman
and said, "Julius Jacoby sent me to see you and borrow
some money. And he said for you to call him up." So
he called up Jacoby, and Jacoby said to him, "This young
man is a young man with a future. He's a very respectable
young man who's in the book business, and he doesn't
have any money, and I want you to lend him some money.
I will guarantee his account up to $5,000." There was
absolutely no reason for this. And as a matter of fact,
Julius Jacoby has always had a reputation--as a mis-
anthrope. When I talk to people now, they say, "He was
a mean son of a bitch. How did he ever do that for you?"
But he did, and he never expected anything back. I never
could do anything for him to compensate.

In any event, with this guarantee, I had some credit,
so that I could go to the bank and borrow a couple of

61

thousand dollars and buy books and deliver them and get
the money and pay them off and take the profit. The
first thing I bought was this group of Haebler. There
were five volumes in all. There was German incunabula;
west European incunabula, which included Holland and
England and Spain and the Flemish country; and then
there was the Italian incunabula. And these were beau-
tiful portfolios which contained single sheets from a
number of the outstanding printers of all Europe. And
among others, the set on west European incunabula con-
tained a Caxton leaf, which in itself has become more
valuable than the full set was then. It was Merle
Armitage who told me to write Carl Zigrosser, the
manager of the print department at Weyhe. That was then
the outstanding art-book store in the United States.
Weyhe himself was a real genius, a man of tremendous
taste and great energy, and a very sharp businessman.
And the man in charge of his print department was Carl
Zigrosser, a young man who was just commencing his
career, and in the course of time became the outstanding
American authority on the graphic arts.

Artists were attracted to Weyhe. He exhibited them
in a little gallery upstairs. It wasn't much of a place.
I had an idea this was a great big handsome gallery.
It wasn't. It was just a wall and a balcony upstairs

62

over the bookshop. But Weyhe had a great talent for
accumulating books and for attracting artists, and he
showed a great many of the first TVmerican printmakers,
along with a lot of the very good prints of older artists.
But what he really specialized in were people who for
the moment aren't so well known — Erail Ganso, [Yasuo]
Kuniyoshi, Rockwell Kent, Marie Laurencin. And he had
prints by Picasso and Katisse for very little money.
He had an enormous business built around his very special
taste, and people flocked from all over the country
to Weyhe ' s to see his exhibitions and to buy these new
printmakers. He had a great deal to do with the graphic-
arts renaissance of the twenties and thirties.

Carl Zigrosser responded very kindly to me and sent
me out several exhibitions for my one wall which I always
reserved for prints. I had an exhibition of Marie
Laurencin; I had an exhibition of Rockwell Kent. The
prints were provided to me; they gave me a discount, I
sent back what I didn't sell. And then my first local
show was Peter Krasnow, the lithographer who lived in
Glendale and is still alive. My second show was the
photographs of Edward Weston.

GARDNER: By this time, of course, you're on Sixth Street.
ZEITLIN: No, I was still around the corner. Then I
moved. I'm shuttling back and forth, but it's all in

63

)

the 1927, 1928 period. And I think the fact that I
was giving these exhibitions generated some excitement.
Arthur Millier of the Times gave me little reviews;
there were people who came in who were aware of all these
new developments in the arts--in the graphic arts--[v;ho] came
and bought prints from me. There wasn't anyone else
who was doing this. And small as my effort was, it was
the only thing of its kind.
GARDNER: As small as your shop was.

ZEITLIN: Yes. But I had a lot of encouragement from
people like Arthur Millier, who was the art critic of
the Times; Merle Armitage, who was the manager of the
Los Angeles Opera at the time and a collector of prints
and graphic arts. And very soon this little shop of mine
was a very busy place. I started getting out little
brochures. I would send out postcards in which I repro-
duced an artist's work and announced that I had an
exhibition. I didn't have any idea how insignificant
these things were by comparison, and I was right.

64

TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
JULY 26, 1977

GARDNER: We were talking about the relative insignif-
icance of . . .

ZEITLIN: Well, my wall was about 6 feet x 8 feet, but
it was the only wall in which these things were being
shown, and through some peculiar stroke of luck I
managed to get publicity for it. At that time no one
else was doing this sort of thing; today it wouldn't
be exceptional.

Now, showing Edward VJeston was for me the beginning
of what I continued to do through the years, and that
is to show photographers. I didn't really know much
about Stieglitz. I simply knew that in my opinion
photography could be an art in the hands of a man who
had the right eye. And I decided that I would show and
offer for sale prints of photographers along with prints
by wood engravers, lithographers, and etchers.

Strangely enough, while they sold for very little,
there were people who bought them. Now, they bought
very few in the long run, and I can remember — I have
letters from Edward Weston in which he speaks very
gratefully of my sending him twenty dollars. Finally we
accumulated a tremendous number of his photographs and

65

offered them for sale. Edward decided to change the
size of his print, the style of his mounting and every-
thing, and suggested that I offer them for sale for $2
apiece. So now some of the prints which turn up on the
market for $1,500 and $2,000 each — and now even $10,000 —
are those prints which I had for sale for $2.
GARDNER: I'd like to stop you here and get some
digressions on some of these people you've mentioned--
just short sketches, personality sketches--because so
many of them were crucial in the era. Merle Armitage,
of course, became an important man around Southern
California.

ZEITLIN: Well, at that time Merle Armitage was the
managing director of the Los Angeles Grand Opera Asso-
ciation. There were two impresarios in Southern
California at that time; as usual, they were spectacular
personalities. One of them was L. E. Behymer, who really
deserves a monument, and for whom there should be a
special biography because I think that Behymer brought
more culture to Southern California from the turn of
the century on into the thirties than any other individual.
He was the concert manager of Southern California, and
every great musician of any sort was presented by Behymer.
When Merle Armitage came out here, it was as assistant to
Behymer, in association with a concert manager in New York

66

by the name of Charles Wagner. Before that. Merle
had been a sort of an assistant to Charles Wagner.
He had been the company manager of the Diaghilev
ballet when it arrived from Russia and traveled across
the country, and that was very exciting, a very strange
and bizarre adventure. This taught him a tremendous
lot about being resourceful and dealing with tempera-
ment. For a while, he was associated with Behymer,
but then he broke off from Behymer and I think he
became a concert manager on his own or in association
with Charles Wagner, who managed certain important
American stars. He had a very close association with
Mary Garden, and soon he was the manager of the Los
Angeles Opera Association. He was a spectacular
personality. He had style about him; he dressed as an
impresario should. He had been born in Iowa. He had
grown up in the Middle West. His name was originally
Elmer Armitage, but he saw the advantage of changing
it to Merle.

GARDNER: It's an anagram, too.

ZEITLIN: Yes. And he, as is the case with a lot of
impresarios, was a combination of genius and con man.
But I'm glad to say that I enjoyed the benefits of the
best sides of his character. He had a great zest for
living. I met him first in this group which circulated

67

around Will Connell, this group that never had a name,
that used to meet at my shop occasionally and that pub-
lished this magazine called Opinion. And in October of
1927, I think it was, Arthur Millier said, "Why don't
you come on a trip to the Sierras with me." And I met
Merle and Arthur at the end of Echo Park Avenue at the
corner of Altivo Way. They picked me up, and off we
went. Merle sported a Packard roadster, which was just
about the peak of smartness. The only thing that
exceeded it was a Stutz Bearcat. We started out and
traveled along the east side of the Sierras. We swam
in the streams; we ate at all of the out-of-the-way
restaurants — and there were some very good Basque
restaurants, there were some very good lumberjack res-
taurants, in places like Sonora. We went up the east
side of the Sierras. We stopped at towns like Bridge-
port and Carson City. We went past Mono Lake when it
was really a very dramatic, somber place, to June Lake
in the snow. For me it was a great experience, a really
coming into life again. We stopped at Reno. We visited
the cribs of Reno, which have just been closed down.
(I read in the paper today that a last-minute effort
to make them a cultural monument had failed.) Lawrence
Tibbett, the great baritone, was a friend of Arthur
Millier, and he had given Arthur some extra money to

68

spend on the trip, and Arthur shared it with us. We
drank good cognac, and I remember reading to them from
John Masefield's "Dauber" in the midst of a storm in
one of our camps. We then proceeded to go over the
Sierras through Truckee in the snow and down into
Sacramento. We went to the State Library Building, which
was just being finished then, and Maynard Dixon was
painting the murals on the walls. They are there still,
and they are really outstanding murals. And this was the
beginning of my acquaintanceship with Dixon.

We proceeded to San Francisco, where we enjoyed
the company of Albert Bender, one of the fabulous
characters, Mr. San Francisco of his day. We ate at
Coppa's. Vie met a man who later became one of the
outstanding composers in Hollywood, Hugo Friedhofer; I
think he was playing an organ in a movie theater or
something like that — he was just barely living. We
turned back and went up into the Mother Lode country;
visited Angel's Camp and Columbia when they were still
in fairly good shape. I remember going to Virginia
City and going down into what had been the print shop
where Mark Twain had worked. We went to Gold Hill,
Nevada. We stopped at the Yellowjacket Mine, which
was closed down, and the old-timer who was guarding the
mine told us the story how Senator Jones of Nevada had

69

gone down into the mine to look it over. It wasn't
producing, and they were going to have to decide v/hether
to continue it or close it down--it meant the end of
the economic well-being of a whole area. He came up,
turned to the reporters who were there and said, "Boys,
she's a sucked egg." That struck me as a truly apt
description.

We went to Gold Hill, Nevada, which was partly
in ruins, and there we went to the ruins of a bank, the
Gold Hill, Nevada, Bank. The vaults had been broken
open, and all the old certificates and the papers and
the records of the Gold Hill, Nevada, Bank were laying
around on the ground. I took a carton and put these
papers, without any selection at all, into a carton
and brought it back and just put it away at home. And
over the years I have sold hundreds of dollars worth
of stuff out of that carton of rubbish that was lying
there in the rain and wind.

We turned back after going to the Mother Lode
country, into San Francisco again, and then came down
and stopped to visit Erskine Scott Wood, the man who
had written Heavenly Discourse, a man who had had a
great reputation. He had published the first edition
of Mark Twain's 1601. He had been an Indian fighter
on the frontier, and later in Portland had been a great
defender of labor and a great liberal, and later moved

70

down to San Francisco and married Sara Bard Field and
remained until his death one of the great American
symbols of independence and defenders of free ideas.
He looked like the Sunday school leaflet picture of
God, with the halo of white hair around his head and
his long white beard. He and this lady of about seventy,
Sara Bard Field, had built a beautiful house at Los Gatos.
Some sculptor up there--! don't remember his name just
now, but I will [Benjamin Buf fano] --had done a pair
of stone cats which stood at the entrance to his estate,
and we drove up the winding road. He met us standing
out on the balcony, this grand patriarchal figure.
He and this very dignified lady were living in sin, and
would have remained living in sin if her grandchildren
hadn't forced them to marry. I remember that he showed
me Garrick's copy of the second edition of Shakespeare,
and I opened it up. And I had a glass of wine in my
hand, and I said, "Wait a minute, I have to put this
wine aside." And he said, "Oh, no, no. Don't worry.
If you spill wine on it we'll just say that it was
spilled by Boswell or Johnson or Reynolds or one of
Garrick's other friends."

From there we went down to Carmel. We stopped and
called on [Robinson] Jeffers. He was very hospitable;
so was Una Jeffers. They didn't repel us. It was

71

before Jeffers had really got to be very famous. He
had published Roan Stallion and I think possibly The
Women of Point Sur, but it was before the masses had
started to invade his privacy. And in spite of the
fact that he was supposed to be a recluse, we found him
very friendly and hospitable. And instead of being the
closemouthed character that he appears from his photo-
graphs, I learned then--and confirmed later in the times
when I saw him--that if he got a chance to be alone
without Una, he was talkative to the point of being
garrulous, which I'm afraid I am being now.
GARDNER: That's precisely what you're supposed to be.
Did you have any introduction to Jeffers? Had you
corresponded, or Armitage or Millier corresponded, with
him?

ZEITLIN: I think I may have written him a letter.
When his Roan Stallion came out, the Liveright edition,
I was in the book department of Bullock's. And I read
it, and I said, "That guy is an important poet, and I
think this guy is going to be one of the important
American poets, and certainly the most important poet
of the Pacific Coast." So I persuaded the manager,
June Cleveland, to order a quantity of the books, and
I started selling them. And I don't know just how it
was; I may have dropped him a note. In any event, when

72

I got to Carmel, I wasn't unknown to him. Una was very
hospitable, too. She was, of course, very protective,
as she was later on completely possessive; more and more
as time went on, she cordoned Jeffers off, partly because
he couldn't stand the pressure of all the people that
wanted to get at him and partly because she was so
terribly possessive and didn't want to lose him.

There was one rift in our friendship, and that
was a few years later when a man by the name of Ramiel
McGehee, who lived in Redondo Beach, turned over to me
a group of letters and postcards which Robinson Jeffers
had written to a foster mother, a woman that lived in
Redondo, about himself and Una at a time when Una and
Robinson had left Una's husband and gone up north (I
think they went to Seattle, Vancouver, and they wrote
a number of postcards to this foster mother) . Well,
Ella Winter, who was married to Lincoln Steffens, was
eagerly collecting anything having to do with Jeffers.
And when I got this material, I immediately sent a list
of it to Ella Winter. She in turn told Una Jeffers
about it, and I got a very heated, very • • • well, I
guess you could call it "disagreeable" letter from Una
asking me how I dared offer these things for sale;
how could I think of selling anything that was so
intimate. And so I wrote back and said to Una I was

73

surprised to discover that these offended her; that these
were for sale, that they had been brought to me by
a man who owned them who was offering them for sale,
and that I had no interest in trying to cause her any
embarrassment, and that I had returned the letters to
this man and told him I didn't want to have anything
to do with it. I'm very sorry I did; I should have
bought them from him and put them away [laughter]
because today they would be worth a great deal of money.
And not only that--they would be essential to the story
of the relationship of Una Kuster, as she was then (she
was married to a man by the name of Kuster in Carmel) ,
and Robin Jeffers.

GARDNER: Did he ever do anything with the letters?
ZEITLIN: I don't know what happened to them. I haven't
the slightest idea.

GARDNER: You never saw them on the market, though.
ZEITLIN: I never saw them on the market. He died,
and they disappeared. And whether they survived and
came into someone else's possession, I don't know.

This man Ramiel McGehee was an interesting
character who had gone to Japan with Ruth St. Denis.
He lived in a little house in Redondo, and he was a
friend of Edward Weston, and later of Merle Armitage.
He helped Merle Armitage produce a cookbook. He

74

stimulated a couple of young fellows living down at
Palos Verdes — they were longshoremen who had turned
lif eguard--into writing. One of them was Lee Jarvis,
who had been an Olympic swimmer, and the other was a
very beautiful young man by the name of Grant Leenhouts,
who managed the swimming club at Palos Verdes. Grant
wrote several good stories, one of which appeared in
the American Mercury, and then one of them was reprinted
in the O'Brien Best Short Stories. The group sort of • •
some of the group--Merle Armitage; Ramiel McGehee;
Edward Weston; an interesting woman, a lesbian by the
name of Tone Price, who followed me out here from Texas;
and a very beautiful young woman whose name I can't
remember right now — well, there were a considerable
group of us which used to go down to this swimming
club in Palos Verdes. We would hold great parties
there at night after the natives of Palos Verdes, who
were paying for the club, had gone to bed. [We would]
broil lobsters, and have great songfests, and dance,
and talk, shout. Later, I introduced a novelist by the
name of Myron Brinig into this group, very much to my
regret.

Myron Brinig was a sort of a sulky baby elephant,
and he had a certain way of winning your confidence.
He had published a couple of books about his family in

75

Montana, a couple of novels. I took him down there, and
later he published a novel called Flutter of an Eyelid
in which he tried to do a Southwind about this group.
He made me into a very ugly character. It was, I thought,
very unkind; and it was, more than that, a betrayal of
an effort to be a friend to him when he was lonely and
needed friends. The publishers made the mistake of
sending me a set of the galleys before it came out,
whereupon I immediately notified the publishers that
this set of galleys, if they published the book in that
form, constituted libel, [and] that I was going to take action.
And I got in touch with a friend here, a young lawyer
by the name of Homer Crotty, who later got to be one of
the very important figures in Southern California. Through
him, I got in touch with a man I'd known before, John
J. McCloy, a rising young lawyer and a member of the
firm of Cravath, Somebody, Somebody, Somebody (DeGardsdorf ,
Swaine, and Wood) , one of the leading law firms in New
York City. John McCloy later became the high commissioner
to Germany for the United States and is now, I think, the
president of the Chase Manhattan Bank. But at that time
he was a relatively young man of promise. I asked him
what he thought could be done about this book. Well, he
got in touch with their lawyers, and their lawyers imme-
diately sent someone out here who got a hold of them and

76

told Farrar and Rinehart, the publishers, that I had one
of the most important law firms in the United States
representing me. [laughter] They couldn't believe it.
They thought this little jerk out here in California
couldn't muster any influence or force, and it was purely
by accident. So they sent another man out here. First
they had Leslie Hood, who was the head of A. C. Vroman
company in Pasadena, call me up and come to see me and
try to persuade me that it would be all right, that there
was nothing wrong about this book. And then they sent
their own representative out, and I made a mistake. He
persuaded me to go ahead and strike anything I wanted
out of the book and let them go ahead and publish it. I
should have consulted McCloy and said, "What do you think
I ought to do?" I think McCloy would have had them on
the carpet for a half a million dollars. In any event,
I agreed to their proposal. In the meantime, they had
issued advance review copies of this book, and they sent
out telegrams and sent personal representatives to every
reviewer that received a copy asking for it back. And,
I'm told, they've destroyed these. I kept mine, and I
have from time to time been able to buy a copy or two.
One of the copies I bought was from a dealer in Beverly
Hills, Max Hunley. He showed me the book, and he asked
me if I wanted to pay fifty dollars for it, and I said.

77

"No, that's blackmail." And he said, "Well, if you
won't pay fifty dollars, will you write something in it?"
And I said "Sure," and so I wrote, "This book is inscribed

in memory of a louse I once knew. — Jake Zeitlin." A few
months later the book turned up with an inscription
underneath: "Says you. --Myron Brinig."
GARDNER: That's amazing.

ZEITLIN: The book was not much of a book. There needn't
have been any fuss about it because it didn't sell. No-
body took any interest in it. None of us were prominent
enough to make good news stories. The book died on the
book counters and was forgotten.

GARDNER: To return to your trip with Armitage and Millier,
was the Jeffers visit in Carmel the last stop?
ZEITLIN: Yes. We stopped in Carmel — I think those are
the last people we saw. We may have stopped in Santa
Barbara, where Brett Weston was living at the time and
doing photography. And then we came down the coast. It
was like an Arthur B. Davies landscape as we drove through
it, not knowing how much road there was ahead of us or
what there was beside. It was like a dream sequence in
a fantasy movie.

GARDNER: You've described Armitage. Could you describe
Arthur Millier a little bit — what he was like then,
perhaps, and something about your friendship with him?

78

ZEITLIN: Arthur Millier had been born in Great Britain.
His father was a music teacher. He came to San Francisco,
I think, when he was in his teens. His first job was as
an artist in the Schmidt Lithograph Company, who special-
ized in labels for bottles and cans and boxes. They were
the biggest producers of lithographic labels on the
Pacific Coast at the time. Now, how he got down to Los
Angeles and how he got to be the art editor of the Los Angeles
Times, I don't know. The man who preceded him was also
an Englishman, and I can only remember his first name,
Anthony [Anderson] .

Arthur became the art editor of the Los Angeles
Times without any training, I think, either as a newspaper-
man or in art history or art criticism. Newspapers in
those days, if somebody came along who said, "I will
write the music criticism" or "I'll write the art criticism,"
didn't examine their credentials any more than they do now.
I mean, a guy like Bill Wilson or Henry Seldis was never
really trained to be an art critic; they're journalists.

Arthur had an engaging way about him. I think he
tried to stay free of any commitments to the people who
had art galleries, but naturally he couldn't help but
develop certain friendships, like those with Earl Stendahl,
who had a leading gallery at that time and who was really
showing some very important things here. I know the first

79

showing of the Guernica of Picasso was in Earl Stendahl's
gallery. After all, it's the art dealers who provide
the medium through which art is exhibited. Without them,
you would not have an art world anyplace. And a city
like Los Angeles owes a great deal to all the different
men — like Earl Stendahl, and Dalzell Hatfield, and Frank
Perls--who had the enterprise, the courage, to present
some of the important artists of their time, and promote
them, sometimes without very much financial success but
always with great enthusiasm. I think they proved what
artists need to learn over and over again: that art
dealers are entitled to make money off of art because
they will give half a dozen shows or a dozen shows in
which they make no sales at all, and then they have to
hope that they will have one exhibition that makes some
money. And when they do, very often the artist whom
they've put on the map will turn around when he's success-
ful and leave him, try to sell the clients direct or go
to a bigger, more influential gallery. I've had that
experience myself, and that's one reason why I don't deal
in living artists' work. I think the most manageable
artists and the most grateful ones are dead artists.
[ laughter]

Well, anyway, I'm not talking much about Arthur Millier.
Arthur Millier was a good talker, a good conversationalist.

80

He wasn't a great intellectual, but he certainly wasn't
an ordinary man. He had immense charm, and he had great
attraction for women --and I think he had great attraction
also for men who liked his conversation and his company.
He lived in Santa Monica Canyon. When I met him first,
he was married to a beautiful dark-haired, dark-skinned
woman by the name of Francine. She was half-Indian,
and before he had met her she had been part of a race-
track, sporting-world crowd. She was a great friend of
people like Baron Long, who ran the Agua Caliente race-
track and built the Los Angeles Biltmore, operated some
of the famous nightclubs of the day. But she had married
Arthur Millier, and they had had three children and were
living quietly in Santa Monica Canyon, and it all seemed
like a quiet and settled life. Then they moved out near
El Monte, to a small place which had more ground on it.
The children could have horses, and they were out in a
semirural atmosphere.

And then Arthur became a great Lothario. Ultimately
he became involved with a Southern woman by the name of
Sarah, a public relations woman. And he completely
went to pieces. He and Sarah took to drinking. They
became impossible at social events and art openings to
which they were invited, and they finally got down to
living in a single room on Skid Row with nothing but a

81

mattress on the floor, drinking and just down in the
gutter. They seemed absolutely helpless. And something
happened, something I've never understood and could
never explain, but they got out of it. Somebody got
them into Alcoholics Anonymous. By that time his wife
had divorced him. He ultimately married Sarah. They
stopped drinking; they straightened out; they cleaned
up; they got an attractive apartment; she again became a
public relations woman, which she had done very well
before. And in the last years of their lives, they lived
very stable lives. He died of lung cancer about five
years ago.

The one tragedy of Arthur Millier was that he was
really a very fine watercolorist and a very fine etcher.
About 1936 or '37, I gave an exhibition of his watercolors,
and I think they were outstanding. They were in the
tradition of the English watercolors. And about the
only person that bought any of them was the woman who
was the most generous and one of the finest patrons that
Southern California ever had, Susannah Dakin. Susannah
bought some of his watercolors; I don't know who else did,
but very few of them sold. His etchings were in the
tradition of Rembrandt and Seymour Hayden. They had
great richness and, I think, a very fine feeling for the
medium, and they sold very little. I think I had two

82

exhibitions during his lifetime. In his later years,
there was an exhibition at Barnsdall Park, and I made an
effort to get the sponsorship to publish a book of his
etchings; but they never were published, and I think
they still should be. And I hope if I live long enough
and can assemble the capital that a catalogue raisonne
of his etchings will be published, because I don't think
a finer etcher has ever worked in the western United
States, and I think it's a tragedy that he remains un-
recognized.

83

TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
AUGUST 2, 1977

GARDNER: We finished up last time talking about Merle
Armitage and Arthur Millier, and I thought it would be
interesting to go from that and talk a little bit about
Opinion magazine, which was the joint product of yourself
and a number of the members of the young literary com-
munity of Los Angeles.

ZEITLIN: Well, Opinion magazine was the outgrowth of
the social activities, really--the getting together of
a number of different kinds of people who used to circu-
late around my shop, have parties, and eat and drink
together. It was a very widely diversified crowd. It
contained people of the extreme right, like Phil Townsend
Hanna, and people who would have been characterized as
pretty far left, like Carey McWilliams. There was Judge
Leon Yankwich, who later became a federal judge, who
was one of the members of the group. There was a man by
the name of Jose Rodriguez, who was a very lively, talented,
charming Latin American, and quite a rapscallion besides,
who wrote the perfect kind of yellow journalism that
Mr. Hearst liked on his Examiner. There was Lloyd Wright,
the architect; there was Arthur Millier; there was another
newspaperman, by the name of Ted Leberthon; Will Connell,

84

the photographer; Kem Weber, who was a furniture designer;
Grace Marion Brown, who was a graphic designer; Henry
Mayers, who was in the printing and advertising business
and quite a tight-laced teetotaler, quite the opposite
of most of the other members of the group. I can't
remember the names of all the rest. There was Paul
Jordan-Smith, who had written several novels and had
edited Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; and Merle Armitage.
And somehow or another these people managed to enjoy the
kind of free-wheeling exchange of ideas and ribaldry
and storytelling and joking that went on in the group.

So the idea occured to some of us that it would be
great to publish a magazine. Well, there were about
twenty people in the group, and each issue was supposed
to be edited by one or more members of the group. They
were to gather material from various contributors, and
then we each contributed $5 apiece, which made a total
of $100. Phil Townsend Hanna had a connection with a
printing plant, a commercial printing plant, called
Wolfer Printing Company; I don't think Wolfer Printing
Company made any money out of Opinion. We managed to
get out a total of seven issues. They had a variety
of contributors--Leroy MacLeod, a novelist; Hildegard
Planner, a poet; Carl Haverlin, Gordon Ray; E.T. Bell;
and I can't remember who else.

85

GARDNER: What was the content?

ZEITLIN: The content was quite varied. Some of them

were essays, and some of it was poetry. Some of them

were political opinions, and some was fiction. And

finally, of course, it sort of collapsed. It ran out

of steam. And it had no opinion, so there was no unifying

philosophy behind it and no motivation that would keep

it going. This random self-expression wasn't enough.

We did get out these six issues. My bookshop was the

address of the publication. There was no actual publisher

listed, and few copies were distributed. We got a few

subscriptions. VJe mailed out some to other magazines

on exchange, and we sent some to libraries, and a lot

of them remained undistributed.

GARDNER: They must be quite a collectors' item now.

ZEITLIN: I don't know. I don't think anybody is really

bustin' his britches to get together a set. [laughter]

Certain issues are harder to get than others, and I'm

not sure that even I have a complete set of them. The

group was never anything like a fixed group. People

came and went. They swam in and out of the school, and

there was certainly nothing like one directing personality.

GARDNER: What exactly was your role? Did you have a

specific role?

ZEITLIN: Well, the only role I had was that I would sort

86

of announce to these people, call them up, or get in
touch with then as they came in and say, "Well, we're
all going to get together next Friday night." Or I would
say to one of these people, "Well, you're the editor of
the next issue, so you better start calling on all the
other people to get some material together." I would
set deadlines. And then my chief function other than
that was to mail them out and to collect the five dollars
apiece and pay the printing bill.
GARDNER: Did you do any poetry?

ZEITLIN: Yes, it had some of my poetry in it. It had
translations of Japanese haiku by Carl Haverlin. It
had political essays by Carey McWilliams. It had a
short story or two. I can't remember who all the contrib-
utors were now; there were contributors outside the
group. It turned out, however, that being nonpaying and
not promising a very wide circulation, there wasn't much
of an appeal. I don't think we ever got anything out
of John Steinbeck or Faulkner or Jeffers, but we really
never solicited them, either. We might have gotten. . .
So this was a little bit of a symptom. I think it
can be characterized as sort of a symptom of a ferment
that was going on in a place that really hadn't arrived
at anything like the cultural maturity that it has now.
A great many of the people that were part of this group

87

became successful in one way or another. Some of them

reached their limit of success fairly soon and didn't

go anywhere beyond that. But it was an interesting

symptom of the kind of vitality that there was in the

community, and of the variety of interests and impulses

that wanted to find expression.

GARDNER: Was it a monthly?

ZEITLIN: More or less. [laughter]

GARDNER: And what was the style of printing, and who

was responsible for the printing? Oh, you mentioned

the shop.

ZEITLIN: The cover was designed by Grace Marion Brown,

and that was uniform throughout. Some of the design

was done, I think, by Merle Armitage and some by Henry

Mayers. I really have no idea how it happened to get

the particular format it did, because there wasn't

anyone among us that was really a typographer. Grace

Marion Brown was a designer, and she designed the cover;

the general format followed from that.

GARDNER: What was the size? Was it a regular magazine

size or larger?

ZEITLIN: It was approximately — I suppose it was 8 X 12

or thereabouts. Yes, it was normal magazine size.

GARDNER: And how many pages per issue?

ZEITLIN: It must have been twelve to sixteen pages.

88

GARDNER: It's a fascinating and little-known part of
Los Angeles history.

ZEITLIN; Yes, well, I don't think that it blasted any
new pathways or created any great convulsions, but it
certainly had a touch of the big city about it--the
big city that was coining to be.

GARDNER: The next area that I've mentioned to you was
the area of your own publication. (I don't mean Prima-
vera Press, because we agreed that we'd try not to talk
too much about that since it's so well covered else-
where.) In going through the archives I found publica-
tions like Booksworm and Booksheet, and of course you did
catalogs from the time you were on Hope Street.
ZEITLIN: I don't remember anything called the Booksworm.
I used to get out — I would try to write something a little
lively for a Christmas sheet. It would be a large sheet
that would fold down into a mailer, and it had some
exhortations and essays and enthusiasms about books and
art. I think that my whole idea of reaching the book
buyers — partly influenced by Henry Mayers, of Mayers
Company advertising, and then by Dana Jones, a very nice
man who loved books, had a particular addiction to
Christopher Morley and McFee (both people who are forgot-
ten now, more or less — they certainly have been eclipsed
and aren't noticed very much--but who had a large follow-

89

ing in their day: William McFee, who wrote stories about
the sea; and Christopher Morley, who wrote charming,
sentimental essays about books and bookish things, and
also wrote one very good novel, aside from several
lesser sentimental things like Where the Blue Begins,
and Parnassus on Wheels, and The Haunted Bookshop — all
which had to do with everybody's wish to be a bookseller
or to have a bookshop on wheels and travel around the
world, in other words to have all the advantages of
an establishment and not be confined to one place) •
Dana Jones was in the advertising business. He took
an interest in me and made suggestions about these large
sheets, which could then be folded up so that you could
do the whole thing in one press run without having any
stitching or binding to do. And they became a sort of
a standard style, if I ever had one standard style.
The other thing is, when I first started my bookshop,
I made it a point the first thing in the morning to sit
down and write ten postcards to ten customers telling
them something about some book that might interest them,
or just reminding them that I was still there and would
like to see them stop in. So as time went on, this did
bring a good many people in, the fact that I remembered
to write them and say, "There's something in here that
interests you." In those days, of course, postcards only

90

cost one cent to mail. Later on, I got a larger mailing
list; and when I would have an exhibition, I would put
some artist's drawing on the back of the postcard together
with a message saying that there was an exhibition — and
these went out once a month to everyone. I think they
did a lot to get people's attention to the shop.
GARDNER: What about catalogs? Did you do catalogs
from the earliest moment?

ZEITLIN: The first catalog I did was, I think, in 1928,
and Wilbur Needham, who had come out here recently. . . .
He'd been a book reviewer on one of the Chicago papers,
and his wife, Ida Needham, a very lovely person--both
of them really very much loved people. They were innocent
like children; they never did grow up. He was deaf,
and he was as beautiful as we think the young Shelley
must have been. They started a little bookshop out in
Santa Monica. He also did reviews for the Los Angeles
Times. But after a while somebody labeled him a Red,
and he was no longer allowed to do the reviews under
his own name. So he did reviews, and in return for the
reviews he would get the review copies of the books, which
he could sell to bookstores. That was what he and his
wife lived off of for a long time, but he did the reviews
under pseudonyms.
GARDNER: What were some of them, do you know?

91

ZEITLIN: I can't remember now. But he did the foreword

to my first catalog, which was published in 1928 and was

a very nicely designed catalog on cream-colored paper--

a pocket-sized catalog, not a large one but one that I

figured that people could slip in their pocket and read

while they were riding home on the streetcar. And it

did fairly well. It could hardly have been called a

financial success, but on the other hand, it succeeded

in bringing a lot of people in. At that time I had a

logo which was a grasshopper. People used to ask me

why I used the grasshopper, and I said, "Because like

the grasshopper in Aesop's fable, I fiddled and sang

in the summertime and froze and starved in the winter."

GARDNER: Even in Los Angeles. Who did you send the

catalogs to at first?

ZEITLIN: I sent them to libraries. It was easy to get

lists of university libraries.

GARDNER: Nationally?

ZEITLIN: Yes, I sent them around fairly widely. I'd

send them to places like the University of Chicago Library,

University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of

Texas, and then I would send them to certain public

libraries; for instance, Cleveland Public Library was

then a very active buyer of old books, and the New York

Public Library, of course, was really in its prime and

92

bought very heavily. And the Library of Congress was
also buying. And then I sent them to booksellers. And
of course the directories of booksellers, the names
that would appear in the Book Wanted section, the Out-
of-print section of the Publishers ' Weekly.- There was
no AB [Antiquarian Bookman] when I started; there was a
separate section of the Publishers ' Weekly which was
edited by Jacob Blanck, and later on it became a separate
publication, the AB, and it was bought by Sol Malkin,
and set itself up as a separate business from Bowker.
Publishers ' Weekly originally was the medium through
which all booksellers and all publishers advertised.
GARDNER: Bowker still does Publishers ' Weekly, doesn't
it?

ZEITLIN: Oh, yes, it still does Publishers' Weekly, and
it's the chief medium for the publishers to get their
books to the attention of the booksellers. It's the
outstanding book-trade journal. It does a very good job.

I think that I was also responsible for the first
book fair that was held in Los Angeles, and that was
held at the Los Angeles Public Library. June Cleveland
of Bullock's, Leslie Hood of Vroman's in Pasadena, and
myself formed the committee. And we got the publishers
interested in sending exhibitions and got their repre-
sentatives to come, and we had a publishers' book fair

93

(it was really not a booksellers' book fair) at the
Los Angeles Public Library, and that I believe was in
1927. I even have a letterhead of that. And that was,
I'm sure, the first book fair held in Los Angeles. I
was the secretary.

GARDNER: What sort of business were you doing in those
days?

ZEITLIN: Well, I think I mentioned before that I had
learned about a firm in England that was exporting
English authors, and they would get out a regular weekly
bulletin describing what was being published by Martin
Armstrong and A.E. Coppard and John Galsworthy and
whoever was popular in the late twenties and early
thirties. And I would order quantities of them--any-
where from five to twenty-five copies--of these first
editions of Virginia Woolf and Robert Graves, [and] a great
many other of the new authors of the time. They would
arrive in packages smelling differently from American
books — the peculiarly different smell of the glue and
paper and printer's ink--and I would stack them up with
their different-colored jackets and designs from the
American books ; and people would come in and buy , and
it got to be a regular thing. Some people even said,
"Send me everything by a certain author as you get it in."
So I had a certain number of customers to whom, for

94

instance, I could send anything by Virginia Woolf or
anything by Martin Armstrong, or anything by A.E. Coppard--
these were some of the popular people--or Sylvia Townsend
Warner, whom I remember particularly. This, of course,
helped keep the business going. There wasn't much profit
in any one of these things; in fact, I think that probably
they were a loss. The money that a small bookshop makes
has to be made out of secondhand books and buying large
groups of secondhand books for small prices per unit.
You can't make money out of handling new books in a
small bookshop, because too many of them remain afterward,
and in those days there was no returns policy.
GARDNER: Especially to England; it would have been
impossible.

ZEITLIN: There was no returns policy to England; and
the American books which I ordered, I had to either
sell 'em or swallow 'era. And very often I was very much
in debt to the publishers for books which hadn't sold
and kept accumulating in the shop. I think the easiest
way for a bookshop to commit suicide is to buy new books
from publishers when it hasn't got the volume of a book-
shop like Pickwick or Hunter's or so on, with hundreds
of people coming through the place.

GARDNER: What kind of money were you making in those
days?

95

ZEITLIN: Very little. I have no idea yet how I managed

to keep the doors open. The landlords were very indulgent.

West Sixth Street wasn't the street it is today, and there

wasn't a great deal of demand for locations. There were

some cheap hotels and restaurants along the street,

and there were secondhand bookstores and other such things

in the area below Grand. We made hardly enough to feed

ourselves [or] to pay the rent, and very often we fell very

far behind on the rent and very, very far behind in paying

the publishers. Maybe after a couple of years and the

publishers kept on digging at us, we'd write to them and

say, "Look, we can't pay you. Do you want us to shut up

our place?" And they'd say, "No, pay us half of what you

owe us, and we'll be glad to let you go on doing business."

Because they needed the outlets, too, and everybody was

in the same boat.

GARDNER: You must not have kept carbons of those because

not very much of that remains in the archive that I went

through.

ZEITLIN: Oh, there is a lot of correspondence concerning

settlements with publishers.

GARDNER: Yes, that's true. There is some.

ZEITLIN: If you read Kathy Thompson's account of the

shop in those days, you'll find quite a bit of reference

to those ups and downs.

96

GARDNER: There's a lot of reference, but very seldom
is there a copy of a publisher saying to you, "Well,
that's okay."

ZEITLIN: Oh, well, there were plenty of them saying
"Pay your bills or else."
GARDNER: "Or else," right.

ZEITLIN: Well, in those days I was looked upon as a
promising bookseller and used to get visits from Bennett
Cerf, who was just starting in; he and Donald Kloepfer
had worked for Horace Liveright. They had been stockboys
and just worked in the place, and they broke off and went
into publishing for theraselves--started Random House.
Cerf used to come out and visit me. At that time Bennett
Cerf had an interest in fine printing, partly because of
Elmer Adler, who was a member of the firm and who sepa-
rately had a printing plant that he called the Pynson
Printers. I was interested in press books and used to
buy a lot. In fact, I think I was the largest outlet
on the Pacific coast for the Nonesuch Press books and
the Golden Cockerell Press books that were being published
at the time. Things like the Four Gospels of Golden
Cockerell Press with Eric Gill's engravings were seventy-
five dollars, and I would take four or five of them, which
was really considered phenomenal. Today those same things
bring twelve-, fifteen hundred dollars apiece. The

97

Golden Cockerell Canterbury Tales, with Eric Gill's
illustrations: I had customers who had subscribed for
sets, so that I think I may have at one time had standing
orders for six or seven sets. And then I remember the
Nonesuch Press Shakespeare, for which I think I must
have had about ten standing orders; there were projected
to be seven volumes, and they were coming out, oh, two
or three a year. This was considered quite phenomenal
by Random House, which was distributing these books in
this country. So they took an interest in me and were
very friendly and encouraged me. And at one time Bennett
Cerf sent an uncle of his out here with the idea that
maybe I would get together with the uncle and we would
found a handpress and do some hand-press publishing, but
nothing came of that. [tape recorder turned off]

A good many of the book collectors in Los Angeles
after a while discovered that they could find some of
the new press books in my shop. I'd also taken an
interest in some of the young printers. The first one
that came to see me was a chap by the name of Gregg
Anderson, who was working as a page in the Huntington
Library. Gregg had the best taste and really the finest
character of the whole group of us younger men. And he
knew what to select in the way of matter to print; he
was able to instinctively pick out good paper and good

98

types. And he printed on a little proof press--whatever
he could get ahold of. He called this press the Grey
Bow Press, and he would print anywhere from five to
twenty-five examples of various things. The best of them
was a thing of Llewellyn Powys/ an essay which I wish I
had kept. I must still have it; I hope it's still around
somewhere.

Later, Arthur Ellis, a lawyer here in Los Angeles
who had an interest in printing, sent over to England
for an Albion handpress from the Caslon Company. It
took a great deal of trouble for him to get that Albion
handpress because they wanted to know what kind of a
person he was and whether he was entitled to have one
of their presses. And then we got the press over here,
and the Treasury Department wanted to know what he was
going to do with this press. Was he by any chance thinking
of printing dollar bills on it? But the press arrived,
and it was lodged in his barn out in the south part of
town, and we tried to get Gregg Anderson to come and
work with it. Arthur Ellis quickly recognized the fact
that Anderson was an unusual person with a true instinct
for printing and types and paper. But Gregg Anderson
wrote and said, "I am not ready to do that sort of thing.
It's a mistake to think that I'm equal to your expectations."
Well, he was then an undergraduate out at Claremont, and

99

later he went up to San Francisco, and he worked as

a printer's devil for the Grabhorns. He learned printing,

every operation that went into the printing of a book,

there with the Grabhorns. Later he went to Boston,

and he worked for a while with D. B. Updike, who was

really the best printer in the country at the time, a

man of exquisite taste and sense of proportion and

quality in typography. And then he went to work for

the Meriden Gravure Company, a company which pioneered

the use of collotype and other reproductive processes

and became an outstanding concern in Meriden, Connecticut.

Following that, he came back to California. VJard
Ritchie was working for me, and I could see that Ward
Ritchie didn't really want to be a bookseller. He was
standing back in the shipping room doing layouts of books
on the wrapping paper instead of wrapping books with the
paper, and so I said, "Ward, I don't think you want to
be a bookseller. I'm going to fire you and give you a
printing job." Phil Townsend Hanna had brought me a
book called Libros Calif ornianos , which was a selection
of the twenty-five best books, rarest and most important
books--which is a difficult set of conditions tc meet
all within one group of twenty-five books. He got Leslie
Bliss, Robert Cowan, and Henry Wagner each to select what
they considered the twenty-five rarest books, and then he

100

contributed an essay on California books, and he con-
tributed his list of the five-foot shelf of books one
should read in order to become familiar with California
history. And we got it out in paperback for a dollar
and a half, and cloth binding for three dollars, and it
sold very well to people who were interested in California
books. Mr. Dawson took quite a number of copies.

Well, Ward Ritchie, and Gregg Anderson, and some
friend of theirs who already had a printing plant all
got together and produced these books, and that was the
beginning of Anderson, Ritchie, and Simon. Anderson
and Ritchie was first, and then Anderson, Ritchie, and
Simon. Simon came along much later.

GARDNER: Then it eventually became Ward Ritchie Press.
ZEITLIN: Well, Ward Ritchie Press was the publishing
outfit, which was separate from Anderson, Ritchie, and
Simon.

GARDNER: I see, which was the printer.
ZEITLIN: Which was the printing concern. And Ward
Ritchie owned and operated separately the Ward Ritchie
Press. Now, I don't know how they kept their affairs
from becoming commingled and entangled. The Primavera
Press was started because of an out-of-luck poet by the
name of Leslie Nelson Jennings --a man who wrote rather
good sonnets but was an old auntie of a character-- [who] had

101

drifted out here. He had worked for Harold Vinal, a
poet who did some publishing in the thirties. Leslie
Nelson Jennings was a Southern gentleman. He needed
something to do and needed something to make a living
at, and he persuaded me that we could do some vanity
publishing; that is, we could publish books for poets
who wanted their poetry published. He would be the editor,
and he would supervise the production, and we would dis-
tribute them through the shop. And that is how the
Primavera Press came into being. Primavera Press was
in its beginnings a vanity press.

A few months--! 'd say no less than a year--after
the Primavera Press got started, and had published,
oh, maybe three or four vanity books, the income from
the Primavera Press was not enough to sustain Mr. Leslie
Nelson Jennings. He was unhappy and felt it was a dis-
appointment, so he withdrew. And I found myself the
owner of the Primavera Press, which was nothing but an
imprint and a stock of books of poetry, most of which
were unsalable. [laughter] However, that gave me the
idea of getting together a few people, like Phil Hanna,
Carey McWilliams, Ward Ritchie, and Lawrence Clark Powell,
and forming a corporation--the Primavera Press, Incorpo-
rated. So that came into being by taking over the books
that Jake Zeitlin had published, and then the Primavera

102

Press had published. Now, my first publication in
Los Angeles was a book that I got out in 1929 with
Bruce McCallister. It was called Los Angeles in the
Sunny Seventies, and it was the translation from the
German of a book by Archduke Ludwig [Louis] Salvator,
an Austrian archduke who had come here in the seventies
and described everything within a day's buggy ride of
Los Angeles, including Anaheim, and Fullerton, and Santa
Monica, and--I've forgotten what the other communities
were — Long Beach, San Pedro. But he had published this
book under the title Eine Blume aus derx goldene Land;
that is, "a flower from the golden land." But Phil
Hanna had been publishing this translation by Marguerite
Eyer Wilbur in Touring Topics — which was the predecessor
of We stways-- serially. He suggested to me that this would
be a good thing to publish as a book. So I went to
McCallister, and McCallister printed it, and I published
it. He got out a very attractive circular, and the thing
sold out within a very short while. It was my first and
probably most successful publication. We did better than
break even, and we had a very nice book to our credit.
Following that, I did a book by Sarah Bixby Smith; it
was the third edition of her Adobe Days . And that's a
book that I'm very proud of because it had some very fine
personal recollections of growing up in Southern California

103

as a member of the Bixby family.
GARDNER: That remains a very important - . •
ZEITLIN: Yes, it remains a very important book. The
first edition of it was published by the Torch Press
in Iowa, and the second edition was also published by
the Torch Press. And then Sarah Bixby Smith, who was
the wife of Paul Jordan-Smith, suggested to me that she
would like to get it out in a better edition and add
some new material, and I undertook to publish it. That
was about 1933. It was a very attractive book, and it
sold quite well. But when I merged my publishing with
the Primavera Press, the Primavera Press then became a
corporate entity; and when the Primavera Press started
to falter, and there were not enough books sold to keep
paying the small salary that we were supposed to give
whoever did the secretarial and bookkeeping work and
wrapped the packages and shipped them out, then the whole
stock and everything was turned over to Ward Ritchie, to
Anderson and Ritchie. And I'm sorry to say that after
Anderson and Ritchie had the Primavera Press for a while,
a good many of the books were junked. Ward says it was
an accident, that they had left them in the place they
were occupying and been told they could leave them there,
and that after a while the people that had occupied the
place following them had dumped these books without

104

notifying them. But, in any event, a large part of Adobe
Days was destroyed, went to the dump; and a large part
of a book translated by Van Wyck, the translation of
Fracastorius ' s [Girolamo Fracastoro] On Syphilis also was
largely destroyed, [as well as] several other books. So
these books are now rarities, not because they were
consumed by the public but because they were destroyed
before they ever got to the public.

GARDNER: The more or less definitive work on the Prima-
vera Press is Ward Ritchie's Influences on California
Printing that was done for the Clark Library in 1970.
Well, I'm going to turn the tape over in a second, and
when we get there I'm going to ask you a question about
some of the printers with whom you worked on Primavera.

105

TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO
AUGUST 2, 19 77

GARDNER: In the Ward Ritchie pamphlet, one of the
publications he mentions is something he did of Merle
Armitage called Aristocracy of Art, and the designer
was Grant Dahlstrom.

ZEITLIN: Well, Grant Dahlstrom was working for the
Mayers Company at that time; it was one of his first jobs
in Los Angeles. I think he'd first come here and gone
to work for Bruce McCallister; then the job ran out,
and he worked for the Mayers Company. And then he went
back to Bruce McCallister, with whom he remained for
quite a long time.

Bruce McCallister was the only printer around town
in the middle twenties who had any appreciation for the
tradition of fine printing or knew anything about early
printed books. And he was a great idolater of the work
of John Henry Nash. In fact, his devotion to John Henry
Nash was excessive and uncritical. Nonetheless, he
recognized the fact that John Henry Nash used good types
and good paper, and he strove for excellence in presswork
and things like that, and he knew enough to appreciate
these things. He also collected printed books, and the
first book he ever asked me to find for him was a Jensen's

106

[Life of] Pliny. Well, I never found a Jensen's Pliny
for him, and it wasn't until many years afterwards that
I finally had one on vellum, which I bought at the Chats-
worth sale and sold for $100,000.

Merle Armitage, who was as energetic as he was
egocentric, had delivered a speech at the California
Art Club, which then used to meet in the Frank Lloyd
Wright house, the so-called Hollyhock House. It had
been Aline Barnsdall's house. And there, about once
a month, there would be a meeting of the so-called Cali-
fornia Arts Club; people like S. MacDonald-Wright and
Arthur Millier, and a number of other people interested
in the critical side of the arts would get up there
and debate.

Merle Armitage delivered this paper one night on
the aristocracy of art and then suggested that I should
publish it. I took it to the Mayers Company, but Grace
Marion Brown actually designed that. Grant Dahlstrom
had very little to do with it, and I'm sure he would be
the first to disown it now because he disliked very
much that bold black type that was used, and he also
disliked the philosophy of Merle Armitage, which was
expressed in that, as much as I did later when I came
to realize what form of elitism Merle Armitage was
advocating. But in any event, I did publish it, and

107

curiously enough I used to have bundles of them. For

years I couldn't sell them, and I used to give them

away or put them out for a dollar apiece. The other

day I went to look for one, and I couldn't find it and

the last one I saw offered for sale was priced at eighty

dollars.

GARDNER: Everything's relative.

ZEITLIN: Yes, it's all a matter of changing and growing

tastes.

GARDNER: What about Dahlstrom?

ZEITLIN: Dahlstrom was one of the first printers I met

here. He had studied at the Laboratory Press in Pittsburgh.

He had gone back to Ogden, Utah, for a short while, but

he wanted to conquer the big city and learn more about

printing, and so he came to Los Angeles. And shortly

afterward, his girlfriend, his bride, Helen, came out,

and they got married. I think that was 1927. I met

them shortly after they were married, when Helen was

pregnant with their daughter Anna Victoria.

Grant was a man with good taste in everything he
did. He wore polka-dot cravats that were just the right
color and size, and his pants were always hung right
with the right colors to match his jackets and shirts,
and I always looked upon him as a man who had innate
good taste. He had a good hand with flowers, growing
things.

108

We became fast friends very early. I introduced
him to Arthur Ellis, and he and Arthur Ellis, with my
occasional help, put together the Albion handpress, which
was the first handpress established here for the purpose
of producing anything like fine printing.

Grant has always followed traditional standards
and styles in his design. His idea has been not to do
anything spectacular but to utilize the materials and
processes of printing for giving the best expression to
the ideas that were to be conveyed by the materials--the
contents which were contained in the vessel of the book.
He was, however, very knowledgeable in the traditions
of printing, and when Saul Marks came to town, Saul Marks
looked him up. Saul Marks was working in a typesetting
plant at the time, and he and Grant came to my shop,
just as Ward Ritchie and Gregg Anderson did, and we would
look at different specimens of printing. VJe would look
at the few good prints, the Durer woodcuts and the Dvirer
engravings that came in the early printed wood-block
books, and all this stimulated us all very much. Also,
Paul Landacre — we took him into the group. Paul's wife,
who was my secretary for a short time, had come around
and showed me some of his wood engravings, and I exhibited
them and encouraged him and would show him all the new
prints that came in. I would take them out to his house

109

and show him different styles of wood engraving-- different
artists' work. We got together one night, in 1929, and
formed what we called the Thistle Club. We called it
later the Rounce and Coffin Club. Gregg Anderson was
there and Ward Ritchie and Grant Dahlstrom. And later
we took in Paul Landacre, and then we took in Saul Marks.
And our idea was that that was all that was ever going
to be of the Rounce and Coffin Club. Each time somebody
else would be the host--we'd eat at someone's house--
and then we would show each other what we had found in
the way of interesting specimens of printing and talk
about them. Then we had the idea that each person would
do a keepsake, and some of the early keepsakes are very
rare because there were only five of them, one for each
member. And the earliest Saul Marks keepsake was really
an exceptional thing. Saul Marks had good taste, not
only in types and the quality of printing, but he also
had good taste in literature. He was reading the Res-
toration poets and Elizabethan plays and so on. And he
chose, I think — I've forgotten now — one of the Restoration
poets to do a poem from for his first Rounce and Coffin
Club keepsake. In any event, the Rounce and Coffin Club
grew, continued to meet, and then somewhere, I think
about 1933- '34, Grant Dahlstrom had the idea that we
should sponsor a western-books exhibition, and that became

110

the main function of the club and has been the thing
which has kept it going.

GARDNER: When did the expansion start? Around then?
ZEITLIN: Around then. Well, we brought in various
people. Roland Baughman of the Huntington Library
was our first secretary, and then Gary Bliss was
secretary for a while, and then Archer--H. Richard Archer-
who worked at the Clark Library. Well, there 've been
about six secretaries over the years, and the club has
continued quite surprisingly . . .
GARDNER: And grown.

ZEITLIN: . . . and grown until now it has a membership
of more than seventy and a lot of corresponding members.
It once had a set of bylaws, which were never read or
observed since the time they were printed, and on the
occasion when we adopted the bylaws and constitution of
the club (which had been printed for the occasion) , one
of our members resigned. He announced that he would not
be a member of any group that had a set of bylaws and
a constitution.
GARDNER: Who was that?

ZEITLIN: That was Raul Rodriguez. I think that was a
fine spirit, but none of the rest of us followed his
example. The Rounce and Coffin Club differed from the
Zamorano Club, number one, in that it wasn't exclusive;

111

and, in the second place, that it was very disorderly;
and, in the third place, it never took itself very seri-
ously. It had no regular meeting places or times and
has continued in the same way.

GARDNER: What was your first keepsake? Do you recall?
ZEITLIN: I can't remember at all. But I think this
sparked us all, and the Rounce and Coffin Club remained
a sort of a mediiam through which we all communicated.
We stimulated each other, we brought ideas to each other,
and I think every one of us benefited greatly, even
the ones that weren't printers. There were people like
Larry Powell that never did any printing, but it was a
meeting through which they could publish some things,
write things for the keepsakes. It was a forum for
debating ideas about printing or discussing our notions
of what constituted a good example of printing and what
didn't. The Rounce and Coffin Club in general disapproved
greatly of some of the more famous of the local typograph-
ers; they looked upon them as bulls in china shops. One
of them was referred to as a "stud horse critter," and
Bruce McCallister said of him that his ideal would be
a book in the shape of a perfect cube.
GARDNER: Who was this?

ZEITLIN: Well, this was Merle Armitage that Bruce
McCallister was speaking of — since both of them are gone

112

and nobody really cares, I don't think it makes any
difference if I tell you.

GARDNER: I notice Saul Marks and his Plantin Press did
one of your early books. When did he first arrive?
ZEITLIN: It must have been 1933. I think he arrived
sooner — he must have arrived around 1930--but actually
Marks set up a printing concern in which Grant Dahlstrom
was a silent partner. And then he took in another partner,
McKay, and the first piece of printing they got out was
a sort of a broadside inviting me to give them some
printing to do. [laughter]
GARDNER: What was he like?

ZEITLIN: Saul Marks was a very sensitive man. He was
a man of very high ideals and very good taste. He could
be very stubborn, and the more you pressed him to get a
job done, the more stubborn he could be. At times,
also, if he had an idea that a certain thing was right
in the way of typographic format, no matter how much it
violated the rules of bibliographical style, he insisted
on doing it the way he felt it would look best to the
printer's eye. And over the years Saul and I fell out
many times, mostly because I would give him a job to
print a catalog and by the time the catalog was printed
and he delivered it, all the books had been sold and the
money had been spent, so that I had a very hard time paying

113

him for a catalog that was no longer of any use to me.
GARDNER: Except as a collectors' item.

ZEITLIN: Yes, except as an ornament. One of his other
first jobs was a little thing called A King' s Treasury of
Pleasant Books and Precious Manuscripts, written by Paul
Jordan-Smith and handset and printed by Saul Marks. And it
is a really exquisite little piece of printing. I'm not
sure that I have a copy of it left because my scrapbook
in which I pasted all of my early catalogs and announce-
ments and so on seems to have been filched; it has dis-
appeared from my house, and I don't know where it is,
and I don't know that it would do anybody else any good.
So except for other specimens of things that I saved in
other places, there's a lot that's missing.
GARDNER: The scrapbook really is missing? Have you
looked through and checked?

ZEITLIN: Yes. I've turned the place upside down. It just
isn't here.

Well, the best book that Saul Marks ever printed —
that he printed in his early years--was Gil Bias in
California,- and that was very much of a labor of love.
Ward Ritchie would go over, and they would make up
different page layouts, and they would set the type
and print them, then hang them up and look at them and
criticize them and change them over and so on. No

114

commercial plant could ever have afforded that kind of
a thing, so they spent many a night and many a day bring-
ing about what I think was a very beautiful and very
well integrated piece of printing--the Gil Bias in
California . Paul Landacre did the engravings. He did
a map of the gold fields, and he did a series of vignettes,
chapter headings, all of which I think represent just
about as good examples of that kind of thing as has
ever been done in a book. It was all around a very
beautiful production. And, of course, it bankrupted
Marks and nearly put the Primavera Press out of business,
but there's no doubt that it was an artistic success.
None of us made any money out of it, including poor
Paul Landacre, for whom, however, it was a very good
medium for showing what he could do; and it later resulted
in his being commissioned to do a number of books for
the Limited Editions Cl\ab. While that was published
as a Primavera Press imprint, it certainly was a colla-
boration of many people, including Grant Dahlstrom, Saul
Marks, Ward Ritchie, Paul Landacre, and all of us who were
part of the Primavera Press. The book was translated
by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur. It was translated from the
French, and it was supposed to have been written by
Alexandre Dumas — but since Alexandre Dumas had a literary
factory, we're not sure that it wasn't written by somebody

115

who came back from the gold fields and was commissioned
by Dumas to write it so he could put his name on it.
GARDNER: The business aspects of Primavera, as I
mentioned, are of interest, too, I think, just for your
comments. Hanna and Ritchie were 30 percent each, you
were 40 percent, and Carey McWilliams was an attorney
with 0 percent.

ZEITLIN: Yes, none of us profited by all this. We
didn't get any money out of it, and we did put a little
in--I don't think very much. I had already put in all
the publications I had, and that was what brought the
press about. It was all ready; there was a Primavera
Press. We were very poor businessmen, all of us. If
we had been good businessmen, we never would have gone
into it, and we wouldn't have produced anything, and
that would have been a shame. So I'm not sorry that it
wasn't a business success. It did about as well as could
be hoped for, considering the impracticality of all of
us involved — the fact that we set our ideals of fine
printing above our notions of good business.
GARDNER: That's wonderful. Well, to move away from
fine printing and back into the bookstore, in 1928 — I
guess late in 1928--you moved to Sixth Street, right
around the corner.
ZEITLIN: Yes.

116

GARDNER: What was the reason for that?
ZEITLIN: Well, the landlord wanted the space. And we
didn't have much room. It was a very small space. We
had built this shop into the back doorway of this real
estate office, T.J. Lawrence Company, at the corner of
Sixth and Hope Street, and they were very nice to let
us have the space at all. I'm not sure how many city
ordinances we violated, and it may have very well been
that T.J. Lawrence decided that he didn't want to take
a chance on being fined for violating a lot of ordinances.
Whatever it was, he said, "I need the space, so you'll
have to go somewhere else." So we went around the corner,
and we published a little playlet called Kicked around the
Corner, which was written by my friend Henry Mayers, in
which I was asked, "Why are you moving, Mr. Zipkin?"
and I would say, "Well, our landlord wants the space."
And then the man would ask me another question, and he
would say, "Mr. Zeppelin, where are you going?" and so
on. He never did once pronounce or spell my name right
in the course of the whole play; that was part of the
joke of it. Paul Landacre did a little portrait woodcut
of me which was used as a sort of a logo in this mailing
piece, and I still have some copies of that around.

And when I moved in 1928 to, I think it was, 705 1/2
West Sixth Street, Lloyd Wright again designed that place.

117

It was a very beautiful place, but it was no more practical
than the previous one. He always had a great love for
putting in lighting arrangements which created a very soft,
diffused light. But when the light bulbs went out, you
couldn't get at them to replace them, and so gradually,
as one after the other of the light bulbs expired, the
place got darker and darker. And finally we couldn't
use the ceiling fixtures at all, and we had to set lamps
around the place in order to keep the shop lit well enough
for people to see the books they thought they might buy.
It was about that time that I started to import a lot
of the books produced by Douglas Cleverdon, who was still
an undergraduate in Bristol and had a very fine taste
for printing and was a great admirer of Eric Gill. He
produced a volume of the collected woodcuts of Eric Gill,
and I bought some of the special editions in which each
proof was signed by Gill. These sold for, I think, as
high as $150 a set, and today I should think that if one
had one of those special copies which I bought, it would
bring anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000. In any event, I
remember filling a whole window with the woodcuts of
Eric Gill.

I had a wonderful young man working for me then.
His name was William Blaine Wooten, and William Blaine
Wooten had come to me out of the blue. He had a natural

118

sense of the Tightness of letters and the Tightness in
proportion of arrangements. If he had persisted as a
calligrapher and a typographer, I think he would have
been one of the very great ones. He would have been in
a class with Dwiggins; he was very much in the tradition
of Edward Johnston. And I was very fortunate to have
him. He designed one catalog which would really have
bankrupted anybody but a very indulgent printer like
Bruce McCallister, who followed his directions and changed
it just to conform to his ideas of the right proportions
and the right use of ornament and color. He hung the
exhibitions; he wrapped books; he did the lettering of
signs. He was a wonderful young man, but after a while
he became dissatisfied — he was temperamental — and he left
me. And I've always regretted very much that I didn't
have the art of keeping him and didn't know what it took
to hold onto him and encourage him, because I think
William Wooten would have become one of the great typo-
graphic designers and calligraphers. He went into the
navy, and I don't know what happened to him afterward.
He was a very good friend of the Landacres, and they
were in touch with him for quite a while. But I do know
that from shortly after he left me, he never again did
anything with this very great talent he had.

I had several very interesting young men working

119

for me at 705 1/2. The first one was Karl Zamboni--Karl
Philip Zaraboni--and in those days he was a very handsome
young man, having all of the best attributes in physical
appearances and personal charm of a combination of
Scandinavian and Italian parentage. He was also a very
good bookman, and I think that he could have become the
outstanding bookman on the Pacific Ccast if some unfortunate
things hadn't happened to him. But when he was with me,
he was very charming, he was very inventive, and he did
a lot of things which advanced my business. He was with
me for five years, and then he left and came again and
was with me for another five years.

His wife was one of the most beautiful young women
I have ever seen. I remember an English woman author
who wrote a satire on Somerset Maugham. Somerset Maugham
had written a book called Cakes and Ale, which was an
attack on Hugh Walpole. And this woman, who wrote under
the pen name of Elinor Mordaunt, had written a response
to Cakes and Ale, which she called Gin and Bitters, in
which she went after Somerset Maugham with a bull whip
and a rapier and really struck some very telling blows.
The result was not that Hugh Walpole applauded her, but
rather he attacked her in spite of the fact that Maugham
had really been merciless in satirizing him in Cakes and
Ale. And Walpole wrote a review of Gin and Bitters saying.

120

in effect, "How could she do that to poor Willie Maugham?"
Elinor Mordaunt was quite an older woman when she came
here, but I remember one evening her coming to our house,
and Cathy Zamboni came in the house. And she stopped,
and looked at her, and seemed to stop breathing. And
she said, "What a very exquisite young woman." And she
was. She looked like a combination of Polynesian and
the all-around American girl. But later Cathy left Karl
Zamboni, and when she left him, it took all of the drive
out of him, and he never became anything like the great
bookseller that he could have become. He left me. He
went up to Northern California, and he is still living
up near Palo Alto and does an occasional catalog, sells
books by mail--a great specialist in esoteric trivia.
And he has lost all of his very great youthful appearance
and handsomeness.

GARDNER: Of course, another of your early employees —
well, perhaps not that early — your employees on Sixth
Street, was Larry Powell.

ZEITLIN: Yes, before Larry Powell there are two others
I would like to mention. One was a young man by the name
of E. Digges Graves, Elliott Digges Graves. His father
was a sort of an advanced Episcopalian minister, and
Elliott and his father both were disciples of Eric Gill
and strived very much to follow his example in lettering

121

and in the crafts. E. Digges Graves was a very strange
man, who never bore fools gladly and was very impatient
with people who would come in and ask ridiculous questions.
Finally it came to the point where Elliott couldn't bear
the ridiculous questions of my best customers, so he
decided to leave. He joined with Stanton Avery, who was
the founder of Avery Adhesives and was his early partner.
The only thing is that Avery continued to be successful
and became an immensely rich man and great business
tycoon and, of course, poor Elliott Digges Graves remained
the strange man that he was.

And another of the young men who worked for me at
that time was Fillmore Silkwood Phipps. As I think of
the names of these young men, I'm wondering whether they
were invented by Trollope or by Charles Dickens. [laughter]
Fillmore Phipps was a very handsome young man who dressed
in tweedy coats and had a seal ring and was very uncommunica-
tive about his family. It turned out later that Fillmore
Silkwood Phipps 's father ran a popcorn stand in the park
at Long Beach. Fillmore had higher ambitions; in fact,
he left me and was a partner in a book business with a
woman who also worked for me at that time. Tone Price;
and later, when they dissolved that business, he was in
charge of making films for a company that was subsidized
by Forest Lawn. And he, poor fellow, started to behave

122

most erratically; started to be impossible and unmanageable
to his wife. Finally she put him out, and he was living
in a room in Hollywood, in a cheap hotel. And when he
died, it turned out that he had a brain tumor; and if it
had been diagnosed early, they might have saved hi'^.
Apparently that was responsible for his erratic behavior.
He left a family of beautiful and talented children and
was a very respectable person.

123

TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE
AUGUST 9, 19 77

GARDNER: You were about to say what you recalled we

closed with last time.

ZEITLIN: As I remember, I closed with an account of

the sort of things that we exhibited--the sort of books

that we tried to sell — Eric Gill's book of wood engravings

as published by Douglas Cleverdon, and I think I also

talked about the design of the shops that I had by Lloyd

Wright.

GARDNER: Right — his lighting systems.

ZEITLIN: Yes. His lighting systems were only good as

long as the light bulbs lasted, and then it was no

longer possible to get back of the fixtures in order

to renew the light bulbs; so that as the light bulbs

blew out or wore out, the light became dimmer and dimmer,

and finally we had to set lamps on the floors and find

other ways of lighting the place. I don't mean this

to be in any way a reflection on the imaginative quality

of Lloyd Wright, because I have come to believe that a

great deal of what was best in the architecture that his

father gets credit for in Southern California was designed

by the son, Lloyd. The father would come along, and he

would do a tremendous job of selling, and then he would

turn loose Lloyd and a team of several of his disciples.

124

and they would go ahead and do the details and creative
work on a place like the so-called Hollyhock House (the
Aline Barnsdall house) and a number of other places in
Southern California. Lloyd was especially brilliant in
combining plants with architecture, and he did introduce
in every place he designed for me some kind of a plant
or a box of green, growing things. And I think in that
he was far in advance of many of the architects that
have come along since. He was very ingenious, very
creative, and certainly produced the most effect for
the least money. He wasn't always practical, and the
amount of shelf space we got out of the walls, for
instance, wasn't the maximum. After a while, the
interest was focused so much on the architecture and
the interior design of my shops, the customers couldn't
look at the books. A great many people would come and
look at the architecture and "oh" and "ah" and walk
away, and that wasn't really what I was there for.
GARDNER: That must have stood out on Sixth Street at
that time, because most of the other shops must have
been very practical.

ZEITLIN: Well, yes, they were very simple, practical
shops. They just took some lumber and built some shelves
along the wall, hammered together a few counters, and
that was it. And bought some glass cases. There were

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several interesting shops on Sixth Street. The largest
one was about a block east of Figueroa on the south
side of the street. It belonged to Holmes; it wasn't
his headquarters, but it was the largest shop and the
last one that he had. He had about five secondhand-book
stores in Los Angeles, and they were really jammed full
of what today would be great treasures. The shelves
ran up to a very high ceiling on all sides of this big
space. He also had a balcony room in which he would
store a great many of the things that he bought in quantity,
and, among other things, he bought up a number of copies
of a little book of poetry called Flagons and Apples

by Robinson Jeffers. He had found the entire remaining
stock somewhere at a printer who had produced them. And
if I bought five copies at a time, he would let me have
them for a dollar and a half apiece. Later he raised
the price to three dollars each, and ultimately we had
to pay as much as fifteen dollars a copy, which seemed
outrageous. Today, I would say that it sells for between
$650 and $750 a copy. And when poor Holmes's store was
finally closed, there was a large number of them still
on hand. At one time he used to auction off books and
sets of books on Hill Street around Christmastime, and
when the selling got slow, they would give away a few
books, including copies of Robinson Jeffers 's Flagons and

126

Apples .

One of the other bookshops was Rogers. [Warren]
Rogers was married to the sister of Ernest Dawson, and
he had a substantial general secondhand-book stock. But
he was never as imaginative as Ernest Dawson, never had
the stimulating style of exhibiting things, or writing
up cards about them, and so on; or meeting people with
the friendliness and enthusiasm that Dawson showed.
Gradually his stock dwindled — he didn't go out and buy
aggressively--and he ultimately closed down and went
into selling books from an office, particularly books
on managing restaurants and hotels, and he seems to have
done quite well at that for a while. One of the most
spectacular bookshops on the street was that of a chap
by the name of Bunster Greeley. Bunster had been a
flyweight boxer. He was about five feet tall and very
feisty, and he had a secondhand-book shop. He was married
to a niece, I think, of Norman Holmes.
GARDNER: Quite an incestuous street.

ZEITLIN: Yes. And one of his earliest employees was
H. Richard Archer, who later became the curator of the
Clark Library and then has recently retired as the librarian
of the Chapin Collection at Williams College.

Further towards Figueroa there was also Kovach's
Bookshop. Nick Kovach was a Hungarian who began, as far

127

as I know, in this country working for a watchmen's service.
He used to ride around on a bicycle and patrol the houses
over in Fremont Place and along in the area that the
Los Angeles Country Club was located in. He happened to
meet one of the men whose house he guarded, a man by the
name of Arthur Cecil, Dr. Arthur Cecil. Cecil had been
the leading urologist of the time in Los Angeles until
Elmer Belt came along, and Cecil had resisted, with every
device at his command, the growth of Elmer Belt — tried to
prevent his becoming a member of the staff of Good Samaritan
Hospital. But Arthur Cecil was a rather testy Virginia
gentleman who, being a surgeon, had enjoyed all the
prerogatives of that role — ordered people around; spoke
with a great sense of command to everyone around him.
Arthur Cecil had become interested in collecting rare
books, and primarily it started with an interest in the
first editions of Edgar Allan Poe . Being a Virginian,
he acquired some letters of Poe (I think he had one page
of manuscript and several first editions of Poe) , and then
he branched out into a few other things. And one of the
outstanding things that Arthur Cecil had was a manuscript
of Gauguin which he'd acquired while on a voyage to Hawaii
a great many years before. He'd acquired it from a lady
by the name of Madame Reviere who lived in Hawaii. I don't
know how she had acquired this manuscript of Gauguin; it

128

was an unpublished manuscript covered with drawings and
unique woodblocks of Gauguin's, and it was about ninety
pages. It was a violently anti-Catholic polemic, and
it was unpublished and probably unpublishable. At the
beginning of it, there was a long autograph letter from
Gauguin to his friend Charles Meurice, in Paris, who had
sent him a great deal of money from time to time, and who
later edited some of his letters. Anyhow, it was a long
and very interesting letter of Gauguin's.

But Mr. Kovach had persuaded Dr. Cecil to let him
get out a catalog of these things and offer them for
sale. It was probably the most remarkable first catalog
that any dealer ever got out. I don't know how many copies
there were, but as far as I know, the only thing that was
sold from this was one of the Edgar Allan Poe letters,
which was sold to Mrs. Doheny. In any event, Mr. Kovach
went on to become a secondhand-book seller and opened a
shop on Sixth Street. And one of his girl clerks, also
a Hungarian, attracted the attention of Richard Archer,
and he married her. Her name was Margot — an extraordi-
narily beautiful young woman and a very sweet and wonderful
person. Kovach later became a dealer in periodicals and
journals, and also would buy up entire libraries and resell
them. He was a great problem, because he would make
librarians very extravagant offers for their books, and

129

nobody could compete with him. The only thing is that
after he took the books, they could never catch him to
get paid. No matter how much he offered for them,
they were great bargains; he would turn around and sell
them at below-market prices. So he spent a great many
years running from his creditors and going from one
deal to another of that sort. He was a brilliant man,
had a great deal of charm, and if he had used his energy
and charm towards a little better disciplined style of
doing business, he would have made a great deal more
money and been a much happier man.

There has always been a mystery about Bunster
Greeley's place. One morning when the place was opened
up, one of his employees was found dead in the place;
he had apparently been stabbed, and no one ever could
figure out what happened or how that man happened to
get killed. It's always been a sealed book. Another
interesting thing: there was an old count who lived
up on Bunker Hill who had, over the years, accumulated
a lot of interesting things, some of which he inherited.
And among other things, he had a painting of a man with
a beard. It was old; it needed cleaning; it was brown;
it wasn't too easy to see what it was. Bunster Greeley
had it in his window, selling it on commission for the
man; I think he wanted something like $150 for it. I

130

took it over to my place and asked several people who
were supposed to be knowledgeable about art to look at
it, because it struck me that this thing was done by
someone of real quality. Well, I remember showing it
to Arthur Millier, and he said, "Oh, it's just another
beard. Don't bother with it." Finally, some man from
up in the Bay Area came along and bought it, and paid
something like $100, $150 for it. In the course of the
years, he researched it; he developed a real background
on it, and it turned out to be a very fine portrait by
[Giovanni Battista] Tiepolo, probably worth $200,000
or $300,000.

GARDNER: That's amazing.

ZEITLIN: The other shop on West Sixth Street that I
remember vividly was Fred Lofland (it probably had been
spelled Loughlin originally, but I think it had gone
through the transformations that American ways with names
have, and it ended up as Lofland) . And Fred Lofland
had a very closely packed shop: I don't know how he
managed to get as many books into one small shop as he
did. One of his most constant customers was a writer
by the name of Gordon Raye Young. Gordon Raye Young had
become very successful writing for Adventure magazine,
and he had a whole series of things going, and then some
of them were published as books. In one, in particular.

131

there was a sort of a Conrad-like story. I took it out
to Ben Schulberg at Paramount Studios, my first time
inside of the office of a cinema mogul--enormous room
with a desk perched at one end of it, raised on a dais,
and, like Mussolini's office, you had to walk a long way
to get to it. However, I must say that Mr. Schulberg
was very kind to me, and he did have this thing read
and synopsized. But for some reason or another, it
never got accepted for pictures. It was called Siebert
of the Islands, and it had to do with some German planta-
tion owner on a Pacific island. That is all that I can
remember of it. However, Gordon Raye Young had an
enormous appetite for books, and when he died, he left
a large roomful of books up on the top of Echo Park
Avenue--one of the Echo Park hills just off of Cerro
Gordo Street. He was a close friend of Paul Jordan-Smith.
And Paul Jordan-Smith and his wife [Sarah Bixby Smith] ,
Gordon Raye Young and his wife, and my wife and I used
to get together and have some very wonderful evenings;
we drank lots of wine and ate lots of spaghetti and
spouted a lot of good talk. Then when we got into the
mood, we would all do our own form of solo dances, our
own inventions. Paul Jordan-Smith later wrote about
my gymnastic ability when I was inspired. I can't
imagine leaping and soaring in the style that he described

132

as I am now, but I'm sure that his visions of what he
thought I was doing were very much colored by the redness
of the wine.

GARDNER: What about some of the non-Sixth Street book-
sellers?

ZEITLIN: Well, I want to mention one other bookshop that
was on Sixth Street which I think ought to be mentioned,
and that is Jones Book Store. Jones Book Store was on
Pershing Square. It was largely a textbook store; it
supplied a great many of the public schools and some of
the parochial schools in the Southern California area,
and they had large contracts with the board of education.
The woman that managed it was a really striking woman.
She was Mrs. Lawrence Maynard, and her husband had been
Lawrence Maynard, who v;as the head of the publishing
firm of Small and Maynard. They had published a number
of good poets and other writers. They had published
some of the editions of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass
and the books of Whitman's disciples. They had published
Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, and they had also published
a good many of the good English titles which they brought
over to this country. And they had employed some of
the very good book designers; I think that Will Bradley
must have done some of their books for them.

A great many of the leftover stock of Small-Maynard

133

was distributed on the shelves of the Jones Book Store.
I can remember seeing them in piles and thinking what
perfectly beautifully charming books there were, which
I could have bought for seventy-five cents, a dollar,
a dollar and a half, and two and a half dollars--and
not doing so. She [Mrs. Maynard] was a very striking
woman; she carried a sort of a pre-Raphaelite air around
with her.

And then there was Parker's Bookstore. [C.C.]
Parker was a gentleman of the old Southern school. He
came to Los Angeles, I suppose at the turn of the century,
and he taught elocution and had a bookstore besides. He
used to dress very formally, with these high-tipped
celluloid collars. He was looked upon as the very [pinnacle]
of what one should read and the kind of books one should
have in his library. And I must say that his idea was
a good one: his idea was to have every good book that
was in print of any publisher in the United States, so
that you could go through the shelves there and find
marvelous books — first editions of Edwin Arlington
Robinson and Theodore Dreiser and a great many of the
writers of the early part of the century — in mint
condition at the price at which they were originally
published. And that went on until sometime in the
thirties when the business finally had to close. That

134

shop was a marvel; there was no bookstore in the United
States (it was said by the traveling salesmen for the
various publishers) that carried so good a stock of books
as Parker's Bookstore did at its peak. Of course, he
got more and more in debt to the publishers; the expenses
outran the revenue, and the turnover was very poor
relative to the size of the stock. And when finally
the stock was sold off, just marked down and slaughtered,
it was astonishing what wonderfully good books there
were there. If someone had just taken the trouble to
get them out--dig them out from under the shelves, price
them, and put them out for sale, there would have been
enough money coming in to pay off all the bills which
finally dragged Parker into receivership. But there
were no bookmen there. One of the troubles, usually,
with book businesses which have lasted for a long time
is that ultimately the man that had founded them--the
genius of the business — cannot hire people or will not
hire people who have the ability to appreciate and to
sell the books the same way they could, so the stock
finally has no one to galvanize it, no one to really
present it and price it; keep up with the times with
it. That's what happened with this place.
GARDNER: You say "cannot" or "will not," and that's
an intriguing duality. "Cannot" because they can't

135

find them, or "will not" because they don't really want
to train someone who will then go into competition?
ZEITLIN: Well, it's very hard for a man to yield the
powers that he has to defer to some younger man. It's
a great blow to your pride, very often, to have one of
your youngsters go out and sell rings around you, or to
take something off the shelf and say, "Look, we've had
this long enough, and out it goes. We're going to price
it at half of what you've put on it." But that's what
has to be done if the business is to go on. And this
has happened a few times; in no case do I know where
it's lasted for more than two generations. All the
great bookshops have sooner or later degenerated because
the kind of individuality and leadership that it took
to carry them on just wasn't there.
GARDNER: Is that true everywhere?

ZEITLIN: Well, it's been true. It was true of McClurg's
in Chicago; it was true of Brentano's in New York. In
this day of branch bookselling, Kroch, for instance,
has remained a great book business, but not in the sense
that it was when Adolph Kroch himself was managing it.
It happened with Weyhe ' s bookshop in New York, which
certainly was the greatest art-book shop in our time and
in the history of American bookselling. And it happened
with Stechert-Hafner, who were great wholesalers and

136

importers of books. I could name many more. It's
happening right now with Arthur H. Clark and Company
in Glendale, which started out in Cleveland and which
has, for almost 100 years, been an outstanding publisher
of western American historical books and also a dealer
in American historical literature. One of the interest-
ing exceptions is John Howell's bookshop in San Francisco,
which has certainly grown and become a much more important
book business under the management of Warren Howell,
but there is no sign of his developing a successor. And,
of course, Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles, which has
been carried on in the tradition of Ernest Dawson — not
as vigorously as he carried it on, but with the same
high standards and principles.

GARDNER: Well, again, that falls within your two-generation
rule, though.

ZEITLIN: Yes, it falls within the two generations, and
I can't think of anyplace. . . . There are no Quaritches
left, of course, no relatives of the Quaritches left in
Bernard Quaritch in London. The Maggses [Maggs Brothers]
are the only firm I know of where the management has
continued into the third generation, and what will happen
there is hard to say. They're all fine people, but there is
no one strong head of the firm, and they are continuing
largely because of the magnificent reputation that they

137

have and the devoted patronage of people like myself

who have done business with them for fifty years and

would like to keep it up. The Goodspeeds--the son and

son-in-law have carried it on, but I doubt if there will

be a Goodspeed's in twenty-five years. The Paul Elder

bookshops in San Francisco are no longer; they continued

one generation after the founder, and then that was the

end of Paul Elder's. And so it seems to go.

GARDNER: To return, have we completed our tour of Sixth

Street?

ZEITLIN: Well, I think we have, except I think I should

go on to mention that Louis Epstein started the Acadia

Book Shop on Sixth Street. He made a mistake in his

article by offering a prize to anyone who could remember

the name of his bookshop, but he excluded Max Hunley

and me. And then he said that he got the title out of

Hiawatha. He didn't get the title out of Hiawatha — he

got it out of Evangeline.

GARDNER: He got that straight in his interview, by the

way.

ZEITLIN: He did. I corrected him, and I'm sure some

other people did, too. But he started the Acadia Book

Shop on Sixth Street after he had had a bookshop in

Long Beach. And one day two young men by the name of

Howey came in. Richard and Ralph Howey came in, and

they offered him $1,500 for his bookstore, and he said.

138

"I'll take it." So Acadia Book Shop became the property
of the Howey brothers. Richard Howey continued with
his studies of economics and acquired a degree, became
a distinguished professor and was head of the Department
of Economics and Economic History at the University of
Kansas, until recently when he retired. Ralph Howey,
the other brother, continued the business. He was a
very quiet man who really didn't like to meet people.
Ultimately he went to Philadelphia and went to work for
the Rosenbachs; he remained with the Rosenbachs for five
or six years, until the business was closed. Then he
went into the business of selling, mostly seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century pamphlets, which it was possible
to buy at one time in large quantities in England. He
would catalog them, list them, and sell them to places
like the Folger Library, Yale, Harvard, and so on, and
has continued to be very successful without having to
meet the public generally. He lives somewhere in
Pennsylvania now. I'm sure I haven't mentioned all of
the bookshops that were on West Sixth Street.
GARDNER: The only one I can think of, offhand, is Kohn.
ZEITLIN: Dave Kohn. Mr. Belch! That was a remarkable
bookstore [Curio Book Shop] . He had a brother who had
had a bookshop on Sixth Street, Soldier Joe, and Soldier
Joe's bookshop continued independently. Dave Kohn first

139

started up on Third Street, and he used to sleep, I
think, on the balcony of this bookshop. He had some-
where picked up the most enormous stock of old paper-
backs, all in mint condition, and none of us had sense
enough to know what a treasure he had. I think when he
closed that shop, most of them were hauled off to the
pulp mill. The most marvelous paperback classics — I
just wonder how many copies of the first edition of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of
the Streets, the first book of Hamlin Garland, and a few
other things like that, were in that library. Dave Kohn
and his sister had an enormous storehouse of books on
Sixth Street; it was a labyrinth. There was very poor
light. You sort of blundered around in this mess of
old books and spiderwebs and dust; and there was no
classification whatever, except in one room of this place
[where] he had segregated and kept up to date a complete
run of Everyman Library books. It was the one place, I
think, in all the United States where you could go and
get any title of Everyman's Library. He kept the stock
up to date and in perfect numerical order, so that if
you wanted an Everyman's book, you could take the catalog and
go in there, and find it. Otherwise, it was a great,
dismal swamp.
GARDNER: To move, then, from Sixth Street outward, were

140

there any other major dealers of used books around
town?

ZEITLIN: No, there really weren't. Louis Epstein
later opened up a shop on Eighth Street [Epstein's Book
Shop] , which he continued until the Hollywood bookstore
commenced to occupy all his energies. And he closed
that and transferred most of his stock to the Argonaut
Book Shop, which was operated for him by his brother
Ben.

GARDNER: What about Alice Millard?

ZEITLIN: Well, Alice Millard was a different kind of
bookseller. She was really a very creative woman who
had had a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in
Pasadena called La Collina. It was a beautiful little
establishment in which she had exhibitions of original
watercolors, of Blake, of the proof sheets of early
bindings of the Doves Press and Doves bindery, and of the
Kelmscott Press. I remember meeting May Morris at her
house. She used to go to London and Paris and buy the
best books she could find. She had a great sense of
style; she would go to the bankers in Pasadena and say,
"I want to go to Europe, and I want to spend $500,000
and buy a lot of good books and bring them back, because
Pasadena needs them." They would lend her the money,
and she would come back, and she would sell them not

141

only in Pasadena but she would sell them to J. P. Morgan
and to the McCormicks and to people all over the United
States. I remember that she always had a big black
limousine waiting for her when she went to call on
customers like Mrs. Doheny. She dressed elegantly,
and she dyed her hair blue.
GARDNER: What was her background?

ZEITLIN: Her husband had been George W. Millard, who
worked at McClurg's Bookstore in Chicago. He had been
in charge of the rare-book department; it was called
the Saints and Sinners Corner. It was frequented by
people like the Reverend Gunsales, and Eugene Field,
and the actor Francis Wilson. He moved out here to
Southern California in his later years. He had nicely
bound sets and gentlemen's books in his apartment. He
would invite customers to come in and see his books,
and serving tea for him was this very beautiful lady
who looked like something that had been created by Burne-
Jones or Rosetti. She was always in the back-
ground pouring the tea, helping her husband. And when
he died, she said, "I'm tired of this piddling business."
So she called in the booksellers and the bookbuyers from
around the area, and said, "Here, I'm selling off all
these standard sets and these neatly bound Sangorski and
Suttcliffe books. I'm through with that sort of thing.

142

I'm going to do some real bookselling." And she did.
She brought great manuscripts, magnificent incunabulas,
books printed by Jensen and Wynkyn de Worde and Fust
and Schoeffer, and so on to this part of the world. She
sold Mrs. Doheny a great many important books in her
library, and she educated the rare-book buyers of
Southern California to a much higher level of appreciation
than they'd ever had before.
GARDNER: What were her years here?

ZEITLIN: I can't say that I know. She was already in
business in the late twenties, when I arrived, and she
certainly continued to be in business until sometime
in the forties. There is a chap by the name of Eliot
Morgan who worked for her, and I hope somebody gets
ahold of him and gets the story of Mrs. Millard from him,
because he knows much more of it than anybody else, and
he's getting to be a gray-haired oldster like me, now.
They'd better get over there soon.

143

TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TVIO
AUGUST 16, 1977

GARDNER: I think it's time to move on into the 19 30s.
Was there a change that came about in the nature of
your business with the oncoming of the Depression and
so on?

ZEITLIN: The change that came about was not so perceptible
as it might have been to some people who had been doing
better earlier. I remember somebody asked Lloyd Wright
how the Depression had affected the artists, and he said
that the artists have always had a depression, and they're
probably better prepared to live in the midst of it than
a lot of people who were flying high. They'd always lived
on basics and hadn't depended upon the luxuries in order
to maintain the certain forms of self-esteem. Now, my
business was never a big business; in fact, I'm astonished
at how little volume--we did in a month what we exceed
now in a day. It seemed to keep us going. Of course,
I paid very little. Some of my employees got $100 a
month, some got as much as $35 a week, some got as much
as $50 a week, but that wasn't very much money. Still,
it was more than nothing. A lot of them hung on simply
because there wasn't a better thing to go to.

I myself drew very little out of the business. I

144

had no fixed salary because, after all, it was a
personal business, and it of course got worse and
worse into debt. But nobody closed us down, because
there was nothing to close down on; you can't
liquidate a business that doesn't have much to
liquidate. I must say, also, that I knew very little
and was very slow learning how to go about buying
books. I bought very few libraries; most of the
books I bought were books that came into the shop.
I didn't know that I should go around to places
like the Goodwill, the Salvation Array, and the other
places that some of the booksellers went to regularly.
I had a vague sense that buying was the most important
thing in the book business, but I really wasn't a
very good buyer, and I bought altogether too many
new books. For a book business with very little
money, the new books are a royal road to disaster
because very quickly you get your capital tied up
in books which become dated, and within the course
of a year, you find that your stock consists of a
lot of books that didn't sell when they should have
sold and now are on the remainder lists. Publishers
didn't have as good a returns policy as they have
now, and the discounts weren't very good either. In
fact, what I marvel at is how I managed to keep the

145

business going at all, considering how little I knew
about the basic elements of buying and selling. I knew
more about selling than I did about buying. I knew
very little--almost nothing--about management, keeping
control of overhead; but when I found a good book, I
could sell it. And I was always able to work a deal,
every once in a while, selling a collection out of which
I made profit enough to resuscitate the dying body.
GARDNER: Did you have any particular orientation? Were
you still selling the same sorts of things in those days?
ZEITLIN: Well, I was primarily selling books about
books, modern English and American first editions, and
fine press books. I was also selling prints. And until
1935, when I moved out of 907 West Sixth Street and went
to 815 (I think the address was) , I kept the place afloat
mostly through buying and selling to collectors, importing
books, finding a good book once in a while on which I
could make a profit, and having an exhibition from which
I sold some art.

GARDNER: What about the fine printing that you dealt in —
did you make any money from that at all, from Primavera?
ZEITLIN: Well, Primavera Press was never a money-making
enterprise. It was an effort to make a place for myself
as a publisher, and I hoped that it would become a source
of income to the business. It actually started as a form

146

of vanity publishing (I think I already talked about
Leslie Nelson Jennings). Between 1930 and 1935, when I
was in the location at, I think it was, 705 1/2 West
Sixth Street, I went from one crisis to another, and
finally I became involved with a man by the name of
Alfred Leonard. I had a friend, a young woman by the
name of Marjorie Rosenfeld--a very fine, sweet person,
about nineteen or twenty--and she was very hospitable
to me. She used to bring me home to her house very
often for dinner (there were parties quite often at her
house) . Her mother was a very smart woman, always very
beautifully dressed, and there was some inherited money
in the family. There was a kind of a sentimental attach-
ment but never a very active one, and certainly nothing
that involved any emotionalism or sex (at least not that
I was aware of) . And Marjorie went off to Germany. She
was there during the time that Hitler was rising. She
met a young German by the name of Alfred Leonard and
married him and brought him back here. Alfred Leonard
was a very aggressive, very bright, young man, who was
quite at a loss to know what to do. He'd brought his
father over--or she had helped bring his father over — and
his brother, who was a brilliant musician, a blind man
but a brilliant pianist. Alfred was taken into Marjorie's
family, and she came to me, and she said, "Haven't you

147

got a place for Leonard in your bookshop?" So we worked
out an arrangement where we were to set up a partnership,
and he was to become a shareholder with the money that
she provided. It wasn't very much; I don't think it
was ever more than $5,000. He came in, and he was full
of ideas about new plans. Pretty soon he turned out to
be overly aggressive and not at all sensitive. The whole
staff started to dislike him thoroughly, which bothered
him not one bit. And he started drawing more and more
out of the business. He went abroad, and he charged it
to the business. By 1936, after we had moved to 614 West
Sixth Street, it became an intolerable situation. My
customers couldn't stand him, I was going into frenzies,
the employees were threatening to attack him physically,
and something had to be done in order to get him out. I
told him and Marjorie that it was no longer possible for
him to go on. He set a very high price on his getting
out.

I then went to Oscar Moss, who was an accountant
and whose wife, Sadye Moss, and wife's family had been
friends of mine. They were all interested in art. They
were a group that lived up in the Echo Park area, up
above Edendale. There was Oscar Moss and his wife
Sadye, and there was Maurice Saeta and Sadye Moss's
sister, who were married. They were all people who had
ambitions and interests in books and in art and music.

148

They were exceptionally bright people. Saeta was a
lawyer. Moss was a lawyer and an accountant, and Moss
had very quickly developed his firm into a very success-
ful accounting firm. He invested a pittance. We
decided to incorporate the business and buy Mr. Leonard
out. He told me that he could arrange to do that. And
so we drew up the papers of incorporation, and he urged
me to go to my friends and get them to become stockholders
in the business. I went to a number of them, and, in
all, I got $10,000. Frank Hogan subscribed $2,500; he
was the largest single subscriber. Oscar Moss subscribed
$2,500. Other people subscribed $100 apiece, and there
were quite a few of those, including Harvey Mudd and
Mrs. Doheny and Homer Crotty and a number of other indi-
viduals in the community.

Mr. Moss put one of his accountants in the place
to supervise things. We managed to get Mr. Leonard out
of the business. He went into the record business and
continued in his ways. He became a broadcaster of a
music program. He opened a record store on Wilshire
Boulevard. He involved a number of people in the business
with him and went through a lot of people's money. He
also went through a number of friendships and managed
to alienate a great many other people. So, as time went
on, I decided that it wasn't just my paranoia that caused

149

me to think of him as being the kind of person that he
was. It was a great pain to me. It was distressing
because his wife was someone that I had great affection
for, and she for me, and this became an almost insuperable
rift. It wasn't until years later that she and her
children came to see me and we became friendly again.
And she remained married to him; she became a bright
professional psychoanalyst, and it was a kind of an
arrangement whereby she carried on her life and brought
up the children, and he lived his own life. He went to
New York and became associated with one of the big broad-
casting companies, remained with them, I think, until he
was retired.

In any event, it seemed that I could always go out
with a satchel full of books and sell; I could always
find a few good rare books and keep the place going. I
had customers like Hugh Walpole who bought quite a few
thousands of dollars' worth from me. I sold books to
Mrs. Doheny. I sold books to Mrs. Getz. But the sense
of crisis was always there, and it increased as time
went on. The finances were always thin; the whole idea
of incorporating the business with $10,000 was a ridicu-
lous idea. To think that that could go on and carry on
over a period of years was really not very practical,
and I have no idea why Mr. Moss, who was such a very suc-
cessful financier and accountant, ever encouraged me to

150

believe that it could. In any event, the accounting
charges that his firm placed on the business were quite
heavy, and there was never enough to keep ahead of the
creditors. We remained there, however, until 1935,
when we moved to 614 [Sixth Street] . It was a beautiful
shop. It was the third shop to be designed by Lloyd
Wright and really the most attractive of them all. I
have a number of photographs of that shop that were taken
by Will Connell, and it was a unique establishment. My
employees were an interesting group. In particular, I
had a man who was in charge of the print gallery, by the
name of Howard Moorpark, who knew a great deal about
prints and who managed to get some interesting exhibitions
and put on some good shows. I had friends among the
artists here — like Tom Craig, Millard Sheets, Phil Para-
dise, Milfred Zornes. I did a lot to exhibit the water-
color school that was developing at that time and got
out announcements. So there was a stream of people coming
into the place constantly, both because of the interesting
design of the shop itself and the exhibitions we put
on. We had a number of interesting receptions there; in
fact, when I opened the shop at 614, I had a party, and
it seems to me, now, as I look back on it, like hundreds
of people came. It couldn't have been that many, but
there was an enormous crowd, and they kept coming, and I
had a great sense of having lots of well-wishers. A.G.

151

Beaman, in particular, who was an insurance man and a
book collector, and a man who spent more time than he
really should helping people like me and supporting
literary activities and bookish activities, had written
a number of letters. I got all kinds of beautiful
letters and telegrams from people all around the country
wishing me well; I have framed in my shop, now, a letter
from Hamlin Garland.

GARDNER: So, though you'd been living from hand to
mouth, you'd really developed an extensive following.
ZEITLIN: Yes. What kept me alive was the fact that,
no matter what I got, I could always sell it. [tape
recorder turned off] It is true that a lot of interesting
people came to the shop. A lot of people were loyal
and supported it. It attracted a great many people
who bought whatever was there to sell, and we managed,
somehow or another, in a very unbusinesslike way, to
keep a business going. Its position was not improving
in terms of profit or its debts. I used bank credit
the best I could but was always having to renew loans
to pay off in part and then start borrowing again.
GARDNER: What was the financial arrangement you made
with the graphics? Were they a consignment sort of
thing?
ZEITLIN: Most of them were consigned. I bought very

152

little art. I managed to get things consigned from
people like Norman Lindsay in Australia, who sent me
a great many of his etchings, and I used to exhibit
them and sell them for $75 and $150 apiece. Now, when
I see them selling for $1,000 apiece in Australia, it's
very interesting. He used to send me large groups of
them, and now I'm quite astonished at how well we did.
I exhibited artists like Paul Landacre. I exhibited
the photographs of Edward Weston and used to arrange
sittings for him. It was never big, but it all added
up. And then Howard Moorpark used to go out and get
prints--he had prints consigned from the East, from
Weyhe, and from other art dealers. As a matter of
fact, it wasn't a great time for graphic arts, and there
were very few print dealers. Between 1930 and about
1955 were twenty-five years in which the graphic arts
had a very lean time: you could sell the best Whistlers,
the best Rembrandts, the best Diirers (and there were
plenty of them available) for very little money. And
we managed to get quite a few of these. We didn't make
much off of them; our commission was something like
one-third.

We also exhibited contemporary painters, but that
was not a very lucrative business. We were one of the
few places in town, however, that contemporary artists
could come with their work and hope for an exhibition.

153

There weren't many galleries. There was the Biltmore
Gallery; there was Hatfield, who by then, I think,
had moved out on Seventh Street; there was Stendahl's
on Wilshire Boulevard; and there was a man by the name
of Harry Braxton in Hollywood. Stanley Rose had a sort
of a gallery. It's curious when I think now of the sort
of things that he had for sale, which were ridiculously
cheap: original blue Picasso paintings, Braques . . .
GARDNER: Stanley Rose had those?

ZEITLIN: Yes, Stanley Rose. There was a man who ran
a gallery in Stanley Rose's place, [and] his name was
Kurt Merlander. Then there was another chap by the
name of Howard Putzel. Howard Putzel was a man with
extraordinarily good taste and a great deal of knowledge,
He didn't have much money--he had a small gallery on
Hollywood Boulevard in one of the arcades--but he did
bring some fine things there. I remember a [Odilon]
Redon drawing that Ed Hanley bought from him, and a
great many other things. However, he was an epileptic.
He couldn't keep his business alive here, so he went
to New York. He became involved with Peggy Guggenheim,
and he helped build Peggy Guggenheim's collection. He
died quite young, I think as a result of one of his
epileptic attacks. But Frank Perls also was getting
started. There weren't many placos--a handful, four

154

or five--where any contemporary artist could get a
showing, and so my place provided an opportunity for
things to be exhibited. And that was one more reason
why the shop kept alive.

GARDNER: Were you close to Stanley Rose at all?
ZEITLIN: Well, we were friends. I knew him over the
years, from the time that he started as a stock-room
boy at the Broadway working in the book department.
Then he went out to Hollywood, and he joined up with
Mac Gordon, who had originally managed a big secondhand-
book store downtown which belonged to a man in Chicago,
Powner's. Mac Gordon moved out to Hollywood next door
to the Brown Derby. Stanley Rose joined forces with
him, and they really got the cream of Hollywood's book
business; they had a spectacular bookshop. Everybody
that was coming along in Hollywood was there, coming
and going--people like John Barrymore, Red Skelton. . . .
GARDNER: Now, this would be about the mid- thirties,
right?

ZEITLIN: Yes, the mid- thirties . And, of course, Stanley
Rose also was a man who had good friends among the
bootleggers. During prohibition you could always get
a drink at Stanley Rose's. He knew his way around. He
never struck me as being a man who was very literate,
and yet he had friends among the sort of the tough-guy
school of literature. Jim Tully used to frequent his

155

place. I'm trying to remember some of the names of the
people who were regulars at Stanley Rose's. . . . Certainly
nobody who came to Hollywood failed to go to Stanley
Rose's bookshop, or didn't know that if you wanted a
drink at any hour of the night, you could always knock
on Stanley Rose's back door, and he was there at the back
of the shop with a jug.

GARDNER: What kind of books did he handle?
ZEITLIN: Well, he handled best sellers. Mostly he would
go out to the studios with big suitcases of books, and
he would sell them to the writers and to the directors
and producers, and he sold a lot of art books to the art
directors. They, in fact, constituted a very important
part of the customers of the book business in those days.
And the research departments also were considerably active
in buying books. The research departments of the studios
had great budgets because everything that they needed for
a production could be charged to the production. In
its prime. Paramount Studios had Miss Gladys Percy, who
bought very expensive sets of books; they could buy a
set of Diderot's Encyclopedia or Napoleon's great set on
the Egypt expedition. They had no limits on the amount
they could spend, and they bought full sets of things like
the London Illustrated News, or Harper's weekly.
GARDNER: And what did they do with these?

156

ZEITLIN: They used them for research, background material
for the films. The writers used them, the artists used
them, and they built up enormous libraries. RKO had a
research library; Columbia developed one later; but MGM
must have spent, in the course of the years, I would say,
close to a million dollars building their research library.
There was a Russian woman there who was head of the research
department. I can't remember her name, but she was a very
spectacular lady who walked around in a riding habit and
carried a quirt.

GARDNER: What's happened to these libraries?
ZEITLIN: VJell, some of them were given away. They were
given to some of the universities--the universities were
told to come in and take them. MGM apparently has retained
its library; I never found out. I went out once to
Twentieth Century-Fox, which had a very well conducted
research library headed by Miss [Frances] Richardson. They
answered the questions of all the writers, they answered
the questions of the art directors, and they provided the
background material. A copy of the script was always given
to the research department, and the research department
immediately set to work to provide background for the
writers and the directors, producers, and the art directors.
So it was a very essential part of movie-making.

Universal finally sold its library to George Macon,
one of the employees of the research library, for a nominal

157

sum, so that they would no longer have to pay taxes on it,
and he could start all over again at the price he'd paid
for it. They leased their space to him, and he then became
a sort of a contract research department for the studio.
I don't know what ultimately happened to that department.
At one time he came to me with the proposal that we set
up an independent research library, a research service
for the different studios, but it was just one more
activity that I couldn't take on. And I think, in the
long run, I was very wise not to.

GARDNER: Well, back to Stanley Rose. In that period of
the mid-thirties, the dealerships around town had changed
quite a bit, I'd imagine. Who were some of the principal
bookdealers around L.A. by the mid-thirties?
ZEITLIN: Well, there was a woman, Jean French, and she
did all her business selling art books to the research
departments of the studios. And she worked very hard,
but she made a great deal of money and, in the end, retired
very well off from just selling art books to the studios.
She would go both to the studio heads--I mean the research
department heads--and to the individual artists in the
art department, and she would sell them books, and they
would buy and always be in debt to her. So half the time
she was selling books, and the other half of the time she
was trying to collect her money. Before that, there was

158

a Miss Marian Blood who sold architectural books and
books on art research to the studios. And then along
in the thirties, the Rapid Blueprint Company had over
the years built up a very large stock of art books, archi-
tectural books. They must have had $100,000 in their
book department. They were out on Maple Street. A man
by the name of Henry Davis was the head of it, and they
decided they were not going to go on with this. So I
bought their stock, and I think that was one of the
lifesavers — transfusions--which I got to help keep the
business going. Because when I think back on the beauti-
ful folios that we took over, all of the great classics
in architecture . . .

GARDNER: How did that happen? Was it open to bid, or
was it through a contact of yours?

ZEITLIN: It was a personal contact. Henry Davis used
to come into my shop--the Rapid Blueprint Company was
then the largest and most active blueprint concern, very
successf ul--and he was a strange man, so very brutally
direct and full of all kinds of aggressions. He hated
his brother (Pierpont Davis) , who was an architect here
at the time. When his mother died, he didn't go to her
funeral. And he was always full of violent threats.
But on the other side, he was a man of considerable
sensibilities, and he had started coming into my shop

159

to see some of the exhibitions. I would have as a regular
visitor here in Los Angeles a man from Bristol, England,
by the name of Kenneth Gallop, who represented a firm
called Frost and Reed. They had the American agency
for Russell Flint's watercolors. And when Mr. Gallop
would come to town, he would set up an exhibition at
the Biltmore Hotel. He would let me take a number of
his good things and hang them in my shop, and I used to
bring various customers to him, and I would get a com-
mission. I sold things to the Huntington Library; I
sold things to the L.A. County Museum. He brought good
English watercolors, drawings, and etchings, as well as
a great deal of material that was purely for the interior
decorator trade. But the Russell Flints that he brought
at that time, which we could sell for $250 to $750, were
the kind of things that later I bought back and sold for
$10,000. And Henry Davis became a customer of mine for
Russell Flint watercolors; he really became intrigued
with them, and he collected a number of them. Some of
them were the best watercolors that Russell Flint ever
did. And I used to buy a few of them in between visits
with Gallop, and I always had Russell Flint watercolors
in stock, and other English watercolors. This, I think,
also accounted for the fact that we were able to keep
going. Henry Davis liked me in a peculiar way, so that

160

when they decided to close out their book department, they

just invited me to come up there and take over the entire

stock on a consignment basis. At first they were all

consigned to me, and I think I got a third on everything

I sold. But I could move them into my shop and price

them and sell them, and finally, when the residue got

down to a certain level, I bought everything from them

at an agreed price.

GARDNER: Now, it sounds as though the art-book business

was flourishing in the 1930s.

ZEITLIN: The art-book business was flourishing greatly.

It was a very important part of our business, and the

chief market for art books then were the studios.

GARDNER: What about other dealers around town? What

was your basic competition?

ZEITLIN: Well, I think Stanley Rose was an important

competitor when it came to the studios. Of course,

Dawson's Book Shop imported a great many art books; Ernest

Dawson had a constant flow of business. I don't remember

who else. I think it was just a great time for selling

any art books that we got.

GARDNER: It sounds as though the competition has mostly

drifted away, then, by now.

ZEITLIN: Well, the market diminished as time went on,

and instead of buying heavily, the studios got to the

161

point where they weren't buying at all. And ultimately,
within the past few years, they were trying to sell,
and if they couldn't sell, they gave their libraries
away. They gave a great many of their books to UCLA
and to use. But in the thirties and forties and fifties,
the studios were a tremendous market.

GARDNER: Was Sixth Street still the center of the book
universe in those days, or had it split up pretty much?
ZEITLIN: Well, Sixth Street remained the street of
bookshops until, I suppose, about 1945, and then the
rents went up. The bookshops couldn't afford to pay the
rents; a lot of the buildings were torn down. The people
that lasted the longest around Sixth Street were Bennett
and Marshall. They remained in the location which I had
had near 614--next door to 614--for quite a few years,
and it wasn't until, I think, sometime in the fifties
that they moved out on Melrose.
GARDNER: Hadn't they worked for you?

ZEITLIN: No, neither one of them worked for me. Bob
Bennett had worked for Holmes, and Dick Marshall had
worked for Dawson's. And a great deal of their stock
came from Dawson, because Dawson was very generous about
giving credit and selling them stuff at marked-down
prices. He believed in buying large masses of stuff,
putting a small profit on them and turning them over.

162

and extending indefinite credit to anybody. He was a
man who might have been called naive if he hadn't been
so intelligent.
GARDNER: And so successful.

ZEITLIN: Well, he was successful to a degree. He was
a successful merchandiser. He was certainly a successful
person. But he didn't leave when he should have. He
should have bought the locations which he was renting
then; they were offered to him for very little money.
And he didn't take the profits he should have taken on
his good books. He became impatient whenever a good
book didn't sell, and he marked it down rather than
waiting for the right buyer to come along. He loved to
buy so much that he would sell anything to get the money
to buy something else. This becomes a kind of a senseless
compulsion among booksellers: they love to buy books,
and they'd rather buy books than sell them. I'm sure
that that's true of me. I find it very difficult to
restrain myself anytime I see a good library, even if
I have to go head over heels in debt. But it was because
of the studios and what they bought, because of the people
who bought prints and drawings and watercolors from me,
and because of the collectors, all of whom were very good
and very generous to me, that I managed to keep the West
Sixth Street shop going until 1938.

163

TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE
AUGUST 16, 1977

GARDNER: Now, as I mentioned, before we get to your
move from Sixth Street, there are a couple of areas to
talk about, and I guess chronologically, the first one
would be Larry Powell and his time with you. And the
thought occurred to me (I'll keep interrupting before
you can start) that it seems that when he came to your
shop, there was more conversation with the local univer-
sities, and then especially after he left and was affil-
iated with UCLA.

ZEITLIN: Well, I'd like to say, first of all, that my
affiliation with UCLA began much earlier than Larry
Powell. I started going out there and selling them
books in 1927.
GARDNER: Up on Vermont?

ZEITLIN: No, they had already moved out to Westwood,
and the librarian there then was John Goodwin. The
woman in charge of acquisitions was Virginia Trout. I
realized that they were building a big research library
that didn't have many books, and that they were in the
market for substantial reference material. So any time
I saw a good set that I thought would fit into their
program, I would take it out or I would write them about
it, and so on. In those days, nobody else that I can

164

think of was doing much in the way of trying to sell
them. They didn't go to bookshops very much, so that I
had a great deal of UCLA's business to myself. And
they would tell me what sort of thing they wanted. I
remember that they told me they wanted a set of the
British Museum catalogs, and I located a set. In those
days it consisted of over 100 volumes, all great big
quartos, and I located a set through Maggs Brothers.
It was unbound, it was in the sheets, folded, ready for
binding, and Mr. Goodwin said, "Go ahead, we'll buy it."
So I ordered that and had it sent. And then the basic
guide to reference tools was [Isadore G.] Mudge, and I
got a copy of Mudge [Guide to Reference Books] , took it
out to UCLA and got the librarian there to check off
what they had and then to indicate what they would like
to have. So I was able to work from an actual desiderata
list. I didn't take the full advantage of it [as] I should
have. I realize now that if I had sent out want lists,
and if I had advertised in the various trade journals, I
could have done a great deal more business. But I was
handicapped then by the fact that I didn't have the
capital to do more business than I was doing, so that it
was really a case of hand to mouth and not enough in
between.
GARDNER: How about some of the other universities — USC,

165

Oxy?

ZEITLIN: USC was buying very little; Occidental v/as
buying very little; and Leslie Bliss at the Huntington
was buying as little as he possibly could, partially
because the attitude of the trustees of the Huntington
then was that they ought to conserve their capital,
not build the library. And it wasn't until quite a
few years passed--until sometime in the fifties --that the
trustees realized that they had something like a million
dollars in reserve funds which should have been spent
buying in the years in between. They called Bill Jackson
and asked him what they should do, and he said, "Gentle-
men, spend it as fast as you can on books, because they're
going to cost you more every year. Your dollar is going
to go down in value, and the books are going to go up
in value." But Leslie Bliss was intimidated by his board.
I remember Robert Schad telling me how he wanted to get
a certain herbal because they had the gardens (they
were supposed to be a botanical garden as well as a
museum and a library) . And he went to Mr. [Robert A.]
Millikan, and after quite a lot of negotiating, he was
told, "Mr. Schad, we will give you the money for that
book provided you promise not to ask us for any more money
to buy books with this year."

Well, you were asking about Larry Powell. Larry

166

Powell came to me because he had returned from Dijon,
where he had gotten his degree. He had married Fay,
and he had expected to get a job teaching at Occidental
College. But the then-head of the faculty didn't approve
of Larry, and in spite of the goodwill of Remsen Bird
and certain other friends that he had there, he couldn't
get a job. He really had no money, and he and Fay were
living down at Laguna Beach with M.F.K. [Mary Frances
Kennedy] Fisher, who was then married to Dilwyn Parrish,
the brother of Anne Parrish. Dilwyn Parrish was a very
talented painter and he also was a good writer. And he
was a fine person. He was the one man that M.F.K. Fisher
always was deeply in love with. I got a letter from
her a few days ago in which she told me the story of
how she went with him to the Mayo Clinic later — I suppose
it was sometime in the forties--and they told him that
he had, I think it was, some form of a degenerative
disease. He had to undergo a series of amputations before
he died. But Larry was living down there, and he didn't
have any money. And I said to Ward Ritchie, "What do you
think we could do about Larry Powell?" I said, "Do you
think he'd come to work for me if I offered him a job?"
He said, "Well, I don't know, but you can try." So I
sent him a telegram saying, "If you want to come to work
for thirty dollars a week, come in Monday and start"

167

(something to that effect--! 've actually got a copy of
the telegram somewhere). And he really didn't like the
idea, but it was better than starving; so he came in
and went to work. And he and Fay found a little house
down the side of a hill on Lakeshore Avenue in the Echo
Park area, and he worked for me for several years. He
could type, he could write letters, and he had a large
group of friends. He made friends very quickly; Larry
Powell has always had a talent for friendship. Through
the shop, he made a great many of the friends who later
were to be his chief supporters when he became the librarian
at UCLA, [as well as] his chief links with the community. He
had a unique opportunity to establish relationships with the
people who were interested in books and who had influence,
both political and financial, because we were located
downtown in the area where the men who wielded power in
Los Angeles came and went. The California Club was around
the corner; the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company was
across the street, and the men who managed Pacific Mutual
Life Insurance Company were customers of ours. There were
people like Seeley Mudd and his brother Harvey Mudd of the
Cypress Mines Company, who had their offices and came into
our shop frequently, and attorneys like Homer Crotty.
There were men like Glenn Schaefer, who was president of
the Security Title Insurance and Trust Company, which was

168

separate then from the Title Insurance Company. And they
all came into the shop at one time or another. Larry
Powell met all these people, and he formed friendships
with them. He would write them letters and sell them
books. One of his jobs was to go over to the Los Angeles
Public Library and call on Albert Reed, who was then the
head of the acquisitions department of the public library.
Albert Reed had first been librarian of the El Paso
Public Library; I don't know how long ago, but it must
have been about the turn of the century. Later he worked
for Fowler Brothers, which was the largest of the new-
book stores in downtown Los Angeles, managed by a very
interesting character, a very colorful man by the name of
Charlie Hixon. Larry went over to call on Albert Reed
to sell him some books, and Albert said, "Larry, you're
not any good as a salesman, but you'd be awful good on
this side of the desk. Why don't you go to library school.
I think I can help get you a scholarship, and, one way or
another, I think it would be a good thing if you got your-
self a library degree to go with your PhD. You would be
one of the men who would be fitted to go ahead and advance
as a librarian beyond that of most people who had come up
through the ranks of library school." So he persuaded
Larry to come up to Berkeley and go to library school.
Larry had very little money, but he took the risk. I

169

don't know how he managed; I think Dr. Al Cass, his friend,
advanced him some money, as other people did. He went up
[to Berkeley], became friends with [Sydney B.] Mitchell,
who was the head of the library school and evidently a
very inspiring man, and got his library degree, came back
down here and again couldn't get a job.

I hired him again, and this time (it was about 1936)
Frieda Lawrence had come into my shop. She'd been brought
in by Galka Scheyer; Galka Scheyer was a very interesting,
very spectacular Hungarian woman who represented the Blue
Four [Die Blau Vier] group of artists--Kandinsky , Klee,
Feininger, and Jawlensky. She was trying very hard to
get people to buy their paintings and drawings, and she
would come to me and say, "Jake, why don't you come up
and buy one of those paintings. It will cost you $300,
and you can pay $10 a month." I didn't have ten dollars
a month, and besides, I thought, I was not going to be
stuck with those things. So she never stuck me with one
of those great paintings, and the only man who really
supported her in those days was Walter Arensberg . [noise
from street; tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER: Now, you were talking about Galka Scheyer and
Frieda Lawrence. . . .

ZEITLIN: Galka Scheyer brought in Frieda Lawrence, and
they invited me out to Frieda's place that she rented —

170

no, to Galka Scheyer's house-- to discuss what Frieda
was going to do about the manuscripts of Lawrence which
she had. I suppose Frieda needed money; I don't think
she had a great income at that time. So I told her I'd like
very much to try and sell them and [that I] thought I could
get a good price for them. But what we thought was a
good price then was miserably little; she would have
taken $30,000 for all the Lawrence manuscripts at that
time. She agreed to let me come out to San Cristobal,
where the manuscripts were, on the ranch, in New Mexico.
And I must say I'm very confused about this; it was in
the fall of 1937. Well, let's stop just a minute; I
want to get the exact date. [tape recorder turned off]
It was agreed that I was to come out to the ranch at
San Cristobal and see the manuscripts. I think it must
have been in the summer of 1937 that I finally got out
to the ranch. Drove up--it was some terrible, dark
night; I don't know yet how I found my way up to the
ranch. I had driven from Colorado, and the next morning
I met Aldous Huxley and Maria Huxley there at the ranch
and Angelino [Ravagalli] who was Frieda's Italian boyfriend.
They showed me the trunk in which the manuscripts of
Lawrence were kept. They did not show me the Lady
Chatterley manuscript, which may not have been there
then; it may still have been held somewhere for safe-
keeping in Europe. But it was a very pleasant visit.

171

I remember the squash blossom omelettes we'd have for
breakfast. I remember also that Aldous Huxley v/ould
get up and type; he was then writing Ends and Means,
which was, I think, the first book in which he seriously
expressed his general philosophy both about mysticism,
pacifism, and the sources of human motivation and man's
relation to the universe. And he talked to me--he told
me something about what he was writing. I said to him
that there would probably be a place for him in Hollywood
if he would like to come out and work for the pictures.
And he said, well, he would think about it ... he
might be inclined to do so. ... I said to him, "I don't
want you to make any contracts or any agreements, but
would you be receptive if a proposal came to you, if
there was someone that said that they would offer you a
job?" And he said, yes, he would be, and he wrote me
to that effect, saying essentially that he would be open
to proposals, that he was not committing himself in any
way, there was no exclusive agreement between us, but if
I could bring someone to him, he would be interested.
And I remember we went down to Santa Fe . We met
Witter Bynner there, and all drove to Santo Domingo for
the rain dance. It was a wonderful occasion to be sitting
there on the ground watching this Santo Domingo rain dance
with Aldous Huxley, Frieda Lawrence, Witter Bynner, and

172

Angelino, And next to us, sitting on the ground, was a
very inconspicuous little man with dark skin, whom I
didn't recognize at all when we first sat down. But
he finally came over and said, "Hello, Jake." And it
turned out to be Stanley Marcus, the head of Neiman-
Marcus .

So the Indians danced the rain dance, and it rained —
and it rained torrents. We got back to Santa Fe, I must
say, a little bit concerned about the flash floods that
were coming down, but we got back up and back up to the
ranch. I drove back from there to California. And
sometime afterward, they sent the trunk to me, and I
suggested to Larry Powell that this would be a great job
for him--if he would like something to do, he could come
and catalog the Lawrence manuscripts. And this he did
extremely well. Frieda came in and he met her. He wrote
the catalog description of all the manuscripts which we
printed in 1937. Aldous Huxley wrote a foreword, I wrote
a foreword, Elmer Belt and Susannah Dakin paid for the
printing, and it was printed by Ward Ritchie. It was
exhibited at the Los Angeles Public Library, and Aldous
Huxley was invited to come and speak. This job provided
an opportunity for Larry to really use his talents in a
productive way, something that combined the use of his
literary talents for literary purposes and for commercial
purposes. And he did an excellent job. He wrote the

173

essays on each one, short annotations--soiT\e longer, some
shorter--about the manuscripts. He described them very
well, and this catalog now has become a landmark, and
it sells for quite a bit of money when it turns up.
GARDNER: Tell me a little bit about Frieda Lawrence.
What was she like in those days?

ZEITLIN: Well, Frieda Lawrence, in those days, seemed
to be a very large person. She had this voice that
people speak of which really was a vibrant Germanic kind
of a voice, but it reached out and struck you; it was
like beating on a bronze cymbal. She had a wonderfully
direct v;ay about her. There was no doubt that she was
an exceptional person, a person who had met the v/orld
with open eyes and had lived her own life quite frankly
and in terms of what she felt was the honest way to live.
On the one hand, she seemed to be this very strong person;
in other ways she was a very weak, dependent woman, and
she needed Angelino. They [the Lawrences] had rented a
house from him in Italy, and I think there's no doubt
that she must have had an affair with Angelo while Lawrence
was in his last year. He promised Lawrence that he would
look after Frieda. And afterward, Angelo left his family
and came to the United States, helped her look after the
ranch, and finally did marry her, and they moved down to
the ranch.

174

Of course, the ranch, San Cristobal, was given to
Lawrence by Mabel Dodge. Lawrence wouldn't take it as
a gift, so he gave her the manuscript of Sons^ and Lovers
as a token purchase price for the ranch. She also gave
him a house down in Taos, a little piece of land, and
Frieda and Angelino moved down there, and they spent the
summers in Taos and the winters in Port Aransas, Texas.
While I was at the ranch, I met the Lady Brett, who had
been a sort of a follower of Lawrence. She vv^as never a
striking beauty; she painted, but she didn't paint what
then seemed to be very good paintings. Later in the
years, she developed into a very impressive artist. And
she carried around this horn which you had to talk into.
It was a speaking horn that deaf people used to use in
those days. I didn't meet Mabel. I was always afraid
to meet Mabel; I always felt that she was a woman that
devoured people. If she took a fancy to you, she sort
of took you in and overwhelmed you, and then when she
got tired of you, she shucked you off. I didn't want to
be one of the people that got caught in her gristmill.
GARDNER: You talked about Galka Scheyer very briefly.
She was really very important in Los Angeles art, and
obviously also had contact with you. What was she like?
ZEITLIN: Well, Galka Scheyer was a little woman. She
never asked people to do things--she told them. And

175

her great devotion was to this group of artists who
she felt were very important, would someday be numbered
among the great artists of their time--and they have
become so. She lived not too well, but she lived off of
acting as their agent, selling their things, making a
commission off of them, but kept pushing these things at
people whether they wanted them or not. She was fortunate
that Walter Arensberg was forming his collection, that he
appreciated what these people were, and he bought quite a
few of them. And some other people did, too, but not
nearly as many as should have.
GARDNER: And would have, twenty years later.
ZEITLIN: She also conducted classes in art, and one of
the things that helped her live, I think, were the classes.
They were not so much classes in how to paint as how to
look at paintings and what the elements of the new art
were. She was a great apostle for the art of the twentieth
century.

GARDNER: How did she happen to come to Los Angeles?
ZEITLIN: I have no idea. I never knew. She had a nephew
living here, but whether he came afterwards I don't know.
But I can't say, unless it had to do with a man by the
name of Herman Sachs. Herman Sachs was a German architect
and designer who came here. He had been associated with
the Bauhaus school, and he came here and became associated

176

with the Parkinsons, who were one of the leading archi-
tectural firms in town, and he did a great many interior
designs for them. They worked on such things as the tile
design for the interior of the Union Station downtown,
and many other designs in connection with buildings and
furnishings in the Los Angeles area. I think they must
have had a hand in what went into Bullock's Wilshire,
which was certainly a revolutionary design, both in the
way of structural architecture and the interior and all
the furnishings that went into it.

GARDNER: Let me finish up with one more subject, unless
you feel like quitting now.
ZEITLIN: Go ahead.

GARDNER: Okay, I thought to finish up this evening
we'd talk about the show you brought in 1937, which was
[of] Kathe Kollwitz.

ZEITLIN: The Kathe Kollwitz exhibition came as a result
of my receiving a lithograph--! think it must have been
in 1933--as a gift from Herbert Klein, who was then a
newspaper correspondent in Berlin. Mina Cooper, who was
one of the loveliest people I ever knew — beautiful young
woman, marvelous spirit, great sensitivity--had met him
here in about 1928 or '29. He came in one day and said
he was going to go to work for what was called the Com-
munity Chest in those days (the United Fund drive now) .

177

And I said, "Well, you're going to meet a very lovely
person down there, Mina Cooper." And he went down, he
did meet her, and fell in love; and ultimately, when
he went to Germany as a correspondent, she went over and
met him, and they were married. And one of the people
that came there while they were in Berlin to see them
was Larry Powell. That was during the time that he was
going to school at Dijon.

I was very much struck with this lithograph that
Herbert and Mina sent me; I think it was for a wedding
present. It was so full of emotion, called The Mothers .
I wanted to know more about Kathe Kollwitz, so I started
reading what I could about her. I think the best article
I read was by Mary McCarthy in the magazine published by
the American Art Association. And so I wanted to know
more, and finally I heard that there was an exhibition
of her work in Minneapolis at the Walker Gallery, and
that there was a gallery in New York also called the
Walker Gallery that was handling her things in the United
States. I wrote to Berlin and got in touch with Kathe.
Kollwitz, and she in turn got the Walker Gallery in touch
with me, and I asked if I could have an exhibition. In
1937, in the midst of the agitation against Nazism--there
was an antifascist movement in this country which was
very radical, of course, and was looked upon as being

178

very dangerous and communistic, which was developing —
I decided that it would be a great idea to hold an exhi-
bition for the benefit of the League against Fascism, I
think it was called at that time. So I arranged to get
this group of prints here. I got the sponsorship of the
anti-fascist organization (I've forgotten what it was
called, but I've got all my files on it here), and it
was agreed that Melvyn Douglas would chair the opening.
One of the speakers was George Antheil, and the other
speaker was the man who wrote Masse Mensch- -Ernst Toller,
one of the most important men in Germany at the time of
the Spartacist revolution in the twenties, late twenties.
He later committed suicide. He delivered a very fine
talk on this evening. We had a very large attendance,
got good publicity both in the Los Angeles Times and in
the Los Angeles Record. And that was the first show of
Kathe Kollwitz on the West Coast. I didn't sell many
of her prints to people in Los Angeles, but Albert Bender,
who was the patron of everything good in San Francisco,
came down about that time, and he bought a complete set
of the Peasant Rebellion and a number of the other prints.
Of course, the prices now seem pathetically low--like
eighty-five dollars for a complete set of the Peasant
Rebellion series, and the prints were selling anywhere
from fifteen dollars to seventy-five dollars. I think

179

the highest price was something like seventy-five dollars.
I must say that the show got a great deal of attention
and moved people emotionally and was a sort of a landmark
exhibition. That was the first exhibition, as I said, of
Kathe Kollwitz on the West Coast, and later, one of the
galleries in Munich published a hundredth-anniversary
booklet on Kathe Kollwitz. In it they reproduced a letter
of Kathe Kollwitz in which she said, "I've just had a
letter from Jake Zeitlin in which he proposes to have
eine Ausstellung in Los Angeles, in California." It
wasn't until quite a few years later that I discovered
that I had a facsimile of this letter. Someone was
researching Kathe Kollwitz in Berlin and came across the
original letter there and sent me a Xerox of it, and then
I discovered that I had a copy of this all the time. But
it was very nice to be mentioned by her, and this was, of
course, the farthest away from Berlin that anyone had
ever shown her work.

180

TAPE NUMBER: VI [video session]
SEPTEMBER 9, 1977

GARDNER: We're here to do the video segment of the oral
history interview we've been working on now for a month
or two. What we're going to do today, at first at least,
is talk about Mr. Zeitlin's personal collection and some
of the many things that he himself has acquired through
the years. Where would you like to begin?

ZEITLIN: Well, I think that it would be very appropriate
to talk about some of the books which I have kept over
the years, because books are for me the symbols of my
ideals, the symbols of my friendships, and the symbols
of some of my ambitions. And without books, I'm afraid
my life would be hardly anything at all. I've piled up
here a few books in a rather haphazard way, and there's
going to be very little connection between one and the
other except as they pertain to some part of me, either
my past or my present. I'd like to say, first of all,
that I'm not a book collector in the sense that some
people are. I have never attempted to compete with my
customers, and there have been times, a number of times,
when I've taken home some favorite book like Darwin's
Origin of the Species in a very fine copy, and the first
man that came along and said, "You know what I really

181

would like is a fine copy of The Origin of the Species, "
I could never resist saying to him, "I've got the book
for you." That says something about me. It isn't that
I'm entirely commercial about this; it's that it gives
me such tremendous satisfaction to have the right book
for the right man when he wants it. On the other hand,
books have been a very important part of my life. They
have amulet value, in a way. There are many books I've
kept which I haven't read, but I have them on the shelf
there because, in some way, they have symbolized an ideal
of mine. And, of course, I've always had the feeling,
just as most people who accumulate books do, that some-
day I was going to get to it and read it, and I wanted
it there when I did decide to get to it. But in the
larger proportion, the books that I've kept have been
books that I have read either in whole or in part.

I wonder if I could go back and determine which
books have been the most significant in my life and
have formed my character mostly. I can only remember
a few. Certainly Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea,
which I read when I was somewhere between ten and twelve,
must have had a considerable influence on me . I think
it had a lot to do with forming my social and political
notions. Later on it was the books of John Burroughs
which appealed to me very much because of my interest

182

of Ashley Montagu's Man ' s Most Dangerous Myth ; The
Fallacy of Race. It's inscribed, "To Jake Zeitlin, father
of this book, with love, from Ashley Montagu, 5th May,
1974." And in the preface, he says, "It was my friend Mr.
Jake Zeitlin, bookseller of Los Angeles, who originally
persuaded me to write this book." What happened was that
I had read an article of Ashley Montagu's in the journal
called Psychiatry, published by St. Elizabeths Hospital in
Washington, and that article was entitled, "Problems and
Methods Relating to the Study of Race." I wrote to him
and said, "I think you have a very important idea there,
and I think you should go ahead and expand it and make a
book out of it." And I said, "My friend Aldous Huxley
might very well write a preface to it, because he approves
of your approach to the reasons for racial prejudice and
racial aggression." So with that stimulation, he started
to write, and he sent me chapters which I read and, in a
small way, criticized and returned to him. Finally he
produced a manuscript for a book. He'd hoped, and I hoped,
that I would publish it; but very fortunately for him, I
found that I was in no shape to undertake any publishing.
I did get Aldous Huxley to write the foreword to it, and,
with that, he was able to go to Columbia University Press
and get the book published in 1942. It's interesting to
see that since then it's gone from a small book of this

193

size to a considerably thicker book of this size in
thirty-two years. It has no doubt been the most widely
circulated and, I hope, one of the most influential books
on the question of race and race prejudice. I hope that
it has played an influential part in changing people's
attitudes toward the notion of the myth of race.
GARDNER: I see a Sandburg down there.

ZEITLIN: Well, the Sandburg American Songbag is another
book which I've kept because of my close association
both with Sandburg and my interest in folk songs. When
I was a boy, I worked on ranches in Texas and also had
listened to some of the people that worked for my father
who went along when I drove a truck--or a team of horses
before then--on the long drives, and they would sing
songs. I don't know where I got the notion that these
things constituted a form of literature, but I felt that
I should put them down. So I collected a good many of
these songs. Also, on the back lot of a house which we
owned in the black section of Fort Worth, there was a
Holy Roller church, and I used to go there and hear them
sing, and I absorbed some of their songs. Very early I
had the audacity to write to Frank Dobie, and I got a
letter back, and I joined the Texas Folklore Society and
received some of their early publications, which have now
become immensely valuable. I was surprised to see some

194

of these things, which were a dollar and a dollar and a
half when they were published, selling for as much as
$250 now. I'm glad to say that I stowed some of those
away as they came in. But the American Songbag of Carl
Sandburg was really his first book, outside of his poetry,
that brought him to national attention. It was the first
attempt, I think, to introduce the American people to the
idea that the folk songs which were sung by the working
people and the tramps and the cowboys and the poor South-
erners were something which were entitled to be sung in
the concert hall and the parlor, as well as in the back
room in the bar.

I met Carl Sandburg on a very cold February night
of 1922 in Dallas, Texas, and he was giving one of his
lectures and guitar recitals at Southern Methodist Uni-
versity. We seemed to have the right chemistry for each
other immediately, and after the concert was over and
the party that followed, he asked me to come up to his
room in the Adolphus Hotel. And we sat up till four
o'clock in the morning, with my singing a number of
songs and his attempting to record them with his own
peculiar type of notation. Of course, tape recorders
like we have here were hardly thought of, and nobody had
one or a lot of people would have saved a great deal of
work and a lot of good material would have been preserved.

195

as it should have been, instead of through the filter
of the bad methods of recording that we had in those
days. He told me that he was going to write this American
Songbag, and he would like to use some of these songs.
Later, in 1925, when I moved to California, he kept in
touch with me, came to see me when he came out here, and
he used some of these songs. I must say that he was one
of the men who always took the trouble to give appropriate
credit to anyone he took a song from. He made a great
many friends that way and, certainly for me, it was a
great satisfaction to feel that these things which all my
friends thought were trivial and hardly polite were worth
recording. He sent me this here and inscribed it, "With
thanks, and hoping health and love keep you, Carl." Until
his death at over eighty a few years ago, we remained in
close touch, although I never had the good fortune to go
and visit him in Chicago or at his goat farm in Wisconsin,
or, later on, in North Carolina. His daughter J^Helga] later
came to see me, and we have kept in touch for the years that
followed.

GARDNER: Maybe we should have you sing one of those.
ZEITLIN: No, I think that that might crack the record.
Now, everyone likes to think that at one time or another
he was early in discovering a talent, and one of the books
that I feel most proud of having spotted early in its

196

publication is The Time of Men, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts.
I think it's a very important novel, and I think it's
important not only for the story it tells but for the way
in which it tells the story. The language is pure, the
purest kind of poetic American English. There's a cadence
to it which I think is unique, and as soon as I saw the
book and read a little of it, I took a copy home in its
dust jacket, and it has remained with me ever since. It's
one of the books which collectors value because of what's
called "the point," the point in this being that the title
is printed not in black, but in dark blue ink, and I defy
anyone to tell the difference unless it's brought to their
attention. However, that makes it a first issue, which is
not so significant as the lovely language which she used.
There is a particular passage I wish I could find in which
the man who sold apple trees describes the different kinds
of apples. There's nothing I've ever read which gives me
so much pleasure for the pure, poetic quality and the
simplicity of it; it's the language which these people she
describes would have used. I notice, now that I look at
it, that this is not a copy that I bought when it first
came out; it's a copy that I bought as a remainder from
J.W. Robinson Company for fifty cents. I must have given
away the copy which I bought when it first came out. This
is another example of what happens very often to good books

197

First editions of Faulkner's Soldiers Pay and Mosquitoes
were remaindered, and we bought them for thirty cents
and sold them for fifty-nine cents at Bullock's in 1926
and '27. Now they bring $250 to $450 each, so it may be
one of the best marks of a book for it to have been above
the head of popular taste.

One of the friendships that I've always been most
proud of, a friendship which I feel very strongly about
for a number of reasons, is that which I had with Rockwell
Kent. I'd first heard of Rockwell Kent through Merle
Armitage, although, of course, I had seen Rockwell Kent's
illustrations in Vanity Fair along about 1922, '23, and
had seen some of his books, like Voyaging and Wilderness ,
very early. But the first person I knew that knew him
directly was Merle Armitage, and Merle Armitage in the
late twenties and early thirties used to boast of his
friendship with Rockwell Kent. Later on, I'm sorry to
say. Merle Armitage decided that his superpatriotism
couldn't tolerate the point of view of Rockwell Kent, and
so he not only disavowed him but he attacked him violently.
That was one of the several reasons why, in our later
years, I was not as close as I had been to Merle. If
Rockwell Kent was good enough for Merle to use as a sort
of a stepping stone during the early part of his career,
he should have been good enough to maintain a loyal friend-

198

ship for later on.

I have a great many photographs of Rockwell Kent.
My first personal contact with him was when I asked him
to do some illustrations or decorations or initials for
Larry Powell's book on Robinson Jeffers. I have a copy
of that here; it was the first book that Larry Powell
published. I might say that it all began when Larry
Powell came in my shop on Hope Street about 1928, and he
and Ward Ritchie were delivery boys for Vroman's. We
talked about a lot of things, and I expressed my great
enthusiasm for Robinson Jeffers, and he and Ritchie both
bought copies of Jeffers 's books. They had, of course,
a good reason to be interested otherwise, because Jeffers
had been an Occidental student at one time, and both
Powell and Ritchie had gone to Occidental College. So,
later, Powell went to Dijon and there got his doctorate;
and his thesis for his doctorate was An Introduction to
Robinson Jeffers. He sent me a number of copies, which
I sold for him. I think the original selling price must
have been no more than two dollars and a half (there were
only sixty copies printed in all) , and the last time I
saw one of these sold was at a book fair in San Francisco
where someone paid $450 for it.
GARDNER: This is the original Dijon.
ZEITLIN: This is the original Dijon edition published in

199

1932. Later, when I started the Primavera Press, I
got the idea of getting out another edition, a regular
edition of this book. I wrote to Rockwell Kent and
asked him if he would think of doing it, and he said,
well, he would be coming out very shortly, and he would
come and see me. So he did come out, and I drove him
down to San Diego, where he lectured. We spent a wonder-
ful night driving back and stopped early in the morning
to eat hijacked lobsters and clam broth with a couple of
longshoreman friends who lived along the coast of Palos
Verdes. And he agreed to do something for the book. He
decided that he would do initials instead of illustrations,
and he did do the initials which were part of the book.
In the meantime, we got acquainted, and we developed a
friendship which we continued. I also wrote Kent, I think.
It was March 22, 1932, that I got a letter from Rockwell
Kent's secretary replying to a letter that I wrote him.
[pause, outside noise]

GARDNER: Now then, before we were interrupted by the
local trash pickup, you had found a letter that you were
about to read.

ZEITLIN: I had a letter from Rockwell Kent's secretary
dated March 22, 1932, in which she says, "Mr. Kent has
been in Greenland since last April, and Mrs. Kent, who is
on her way to join him there now, has been away much of

200

the time." Then she goes ahead and says that she has
written to Mr. A.N. Kemp telling him Mr. Kent will return
sometime in the fall, and suggested he write again at
that time. Now, A.N. Kemp was one of my earliest cus-
tomers. He was connected with the California Bank, v/hich
was the forerunner of the United California Bank here in
Southern California, and he was a very important man in
the financial world. He had the idea of having Rockwell
Kent do a bookplate for him, and it was because of that
that Kemp wrote Kent.

This particular book that I'm holding up here is a
copy of Rockwell Kentiana, the works and a few words and
many pictures by Rockwell Kent. This was published in a
substantial edition by Harcourt Brace and Company in 1933.
The interesting thing about this copy is that it is in-
scribed with a special photograph which we had put into a
few copies, which says, "Yours truly, Rockwell Kent, to
Jake and Jean." And this shows Rockwell Kent at what
must have been the age of four or five dressed in a Little
Lord Fauntleroy hat--not very consistent with the character
we have of Kent as a man who went out into the wilderness
of Greenland and Newfoundland and built himself houses in
the wilderness.

This Rockwell Kentiana is both by Rockwell Kent and
Carl Zigrosser, who did the bibliography and a list of his

201

prints. It was dedicated to C.Z. and shows a handclasp
with "1910 plus," which indicates that they had originally
met in 1910. Carl Zigrosser was a wonderful man. He
was, I think, the patron saint of printmaking in America
for a great many years. My first contact with him was
about 1928 when I wrote him from my first shop; he was in
charge of the print department at Weyhe's. Because of
Zigrosser, a great many artists got their first showings
of prints and their encouragement. Carl Zigrosser later
went on to become the curator of prints at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. He wrote some of the most authoritative
books on connoisseurship and the collecting of prints,
and died a couple of years ago in Switzerland, where he'd
gone to retire. It was very much to his credit--i_s very
much to his credit — that he discovered Paul Landacre here
in Southern California and encouraged him, came to see
him, exhibited his prints at Weyhe's in New York, and
helped create a reputation for him. Hardly anyone else
in the East has recognized Paul Landacre' s genius since
then except, of course, George Macy, who used him to illus-
trate a number of the Limited Edition Club books. And now
the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art came to me
a few weeks ago and said that they were getting together
material for a full-scale exhibition of the wood engravings
of Paul Landacre.

202

One of the photographs which I have of Rockwell
Kent shows him here with Rosemary Haskell. Rosemary
was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, and
Rockwell Kent had a great taste for beautiful young
women. This was done, I think, sometime around 1942,
when he had come out originally. I had introduced him
to Dorothy Wagner, who was another very beautiful young
woman. Dorothy was a premier dancer for Misha Ito, and
it seemed that wherever Rockwell Kent went, he always
attracted extraordinarily beautiful women who attached
themselves to him without hesitation or delay. Rosemary
Haskell later married Albert Maltz and finally committed
suicide after a long depression. One of the most amusing
experiences I ever had was long before I met Rockwell Kent,
when I was invited to a friend's house to meet him. And
I went there, and here was a fellow, about five foot four,
with curly black hair and a mustache, who was representing
himself to be Rockwell Kent. It turned out to be Mike
Romanoff. Can I stop here a minute? [tape recorder turned
off]

GARDNER: We have a few minutes left to wrap up.
ZEITLIN: Of course, Rockwell Kent was over six feet tall
and had a bald head, so there was no resemblance at all
between Mike Romanoff and Rockwell Kent. But he used this
little gambit on people who had never met Kent, and he got

203

away with it several times.

GARDNER: Well, Romanoff was a great impostor, anyway,
wasn' t he?

ZEITLIN : Yes, he was an amusing impostor, and nobody
ever got very mad at him or prosecuted him because he
never used it to take advantage of anybody or get money
out of them or anything like that. Of course, later
on, Michael Romanoff opened a very fine restaurant in
Beverly Hills, and we got to be very good friends. He
had quite scholarly tastes and used to buy some most
erudite books from me, including Greek-English diction-
aries and some of the more highly esteemed editions of
the classics. Well, I think we've come very close to
the end of our time, so I hope that this has given you
some idea of the sort of books of a certain type which
I've collected. Although this doesn't cover the books
of people with whom I've had no personal association
and which I've collected for other reasons.
GARDNER: Now, you did mention very briefly (before we
close up here) the collecting of the Brueghel. Is that
about the only area that you collect outside of the
incidentals? I take it you wouldn't sell the Brueghel
material if someone came along and knocked on the door
and asked for it.
ZEITLIN: The collection of books about Brueghel we're

204

not going to sell. But some day we're going to give
them somewhere where we hope they'll be kept together
and used as a source of reference and study by someone
who may want to write more about Pieter Breughel, or
by some of the print collectors. It would be a shame
for it to be dispersed after these books have all been
brought together, and we think that either the Los
Angeles Museum or the National Gallery of Art will
want to keep them together. In the not-too-distant
future we're going to see what we can do about that.
It's been a great pleasure for Josephine to get these
books together and to read a great many of them. Of
course, as always, a great part of the fun is in the
chase.

GARDNER: Well, Mr. Zeitlin, thank you very much for
your time, and I'll be back next Tuesday.
ZEITLIN: Thank you.

205

TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 29, 1977

GARDNER: Now, as previewed, you said that there was
more than one article that you wrote for Reader ' s Digest.
The only one that I had read about was the one in 1936.
ZEITLIN: Well, I think the first one I did was in 1935,
and this was the result of my acquaintance with the
Reverend Charles Ferguson, whom I had known when he was
a young, rather controversial Methodist minister in Fort
Worth, Texas. He didn't last long v/ith his congregation
there, but I knew him only slightly, in the twenties,
when we both lived there. He commenced to write for
[H.L.] Mencken's American Mercury. He wrote several
articles about American religions, and then he later did
a thing called "500,000 Brothers" (as I remember the
title) , which had to do with American organizations such
as the Shriners, the Odd Fellows, and all the other
civic organizations. In addition, he wrote about American
religious cults and American orthodoxy. He naturally
followed the general point of view of Mencken and [George
Jean] Nathan, which was to ridicule the boobs. And then,
much to my surprise, after I got out here and had been
here for some time, I heard from him again and discovered
that he was an associate editor of Reader's Digest. He
came out here to visit me, quite without any special plan.

206

and he and a man by the name of Charlie Dunning and
I went out to the Huntington Library.

Charlie Dunning was a newspaperman who had done
public relations work for the movies; before that he
had been on the Chicago Daily News and was a friend
of Carl Sandburg. It was through Carl Sandburg that
I met Charlie Dunning. Charlie Dunning, at the time
I met him, was publicity man, general P.R. man for
Estelle Taylor. She was married to Jack Dempsey, who
had abducted her. She was quite a successful figure in
the movies, and Jack Dempsey had got a great passion
for her and kidnapped her and took her down to Agua
Caliente, which was a great resort then, and married
her. She was in mortal fear of him, and I think that
she was afraid to not marry him.

But in any event, Charlie, who was a pretty heavy
man with the bottle, and Carl Sandburg would go off
for weekends, usually around Laguna, and stay in a state
of mild intoxication for several days and then come back
to Los Angeles and visit around with their friends. And
Carl would do his usual concertizing . So I got to know
Charlie Dunning quite well, and he did some very kind
things for me when I had problems later on. But Charlie
Dunning came with Charlie Ferguson and me out to the
Huntington Library, and we met a Dr. [Lodowick] Bendicksen,

207

a Dutchman who was then in charge of the photographic
laboratory at the Huntington Library. Dr. Bendicksen
had originated some documentation techniques, including
the first microcards and microfiche that I ever saw,
and he demonstrated those to us, and he also demonstrated
microfilm. So Charlie Ferguson got the idea that this
would make a good story, and it was agreed that Charlie
Dunning and I would collaborate. So we interviewed
Bendicksen, got all the information that we could, and
then, between us, we did the articles.

Now, a regular practice of Reader ' s Digest was to
buy articles from other magazines. But they very often
would inspire an article and then refer the editor of
the particular magazine to the writer of the article
and he would buy it. For instance, the editor of World' s
Work, where our article "Lilliputian Libraries" first
appeared, paid us $45 for it, and then Reader' s Digest
would buy the reprint rights and pay us $2,000 for it.
So we suddenly landed with a very substantial sum of
money for each of us- It was this kind of break once in
a while which kept the book business going.
GARDNER: This was the first writing you'd done in a
while, wasn't it?

ZEITLIN: No, I'd always done some writing, but it never
appeared in anything except, you know, local magazines.

208

and usually it was about books. Or I tried to write
some poetry, which also appeared in places like the
San Francisco Review and some of the other little poetry
magazines .

Then the year following, I had talked to Ferguson
about the fact that a great many valuable materials, the
ephemera upon which history is based, the things which
historians need really to write accurately, were the
things that weren't worth very much money but that in
time would become very valuable and very useful. And I
talked about such things as the road maps that filling
stations gave away and still give away; over the course
of a year, a series of road maps, showing the highways
of the United States and their growth and the changes
that had taken place, really constituted a valuable
documentary source. And I told stories about different
things which had come my way which had turned out to be
valuable, such as a road map used by the immigrants —
T.H. Jefferson's Emigrant' s Guide from St. Joseph, Missouri,
to St. Francisco, published in 1848. This particular one
that a lady had brought in to me, which was folded up in a
little container no bigger than a cigarette pack, had
written on the face of it, "With the compliments of T.H.
Jefferson to Benjamin Holliday of the Holliday Stage Lines."
So this was a very vitally important map of the Overland

209

Road, the road used by the immigrants, and later it
was used by Ben Holliday for setting up the route of
the stage lines. I asked the lady how much she wanted
for it, and she said twenty-five dollars. And it seemed
to me that that was a reasonable price. I really had
no idea what that was worth, and so I bought it and then
went to Robert Cowan, the man who had done the definitive
bibliography of California and who v/as the librarian for
William Andrews Clark, and asked him about it. And he
said, "Has it got the little pamphlet giving instructions
to the immigrants on where to camp, how to avoid some of
the hazards of the overland crossing?" I said yes. "Well,"
he said, "the only other copy known of this doesn't have
that." So finally he suggested I ask $1,000 for it, but I
decided that was too much, so I offered it to Mrs. Doheny
for $750, and she bought it. The next day I got a wire
from Ed Eberstadt, who was a great dealer in Western Ameri-
cana in those days, offering me $1,500 for it. So I figured
I'd lost $750 on that transaction! Well, it was stories
like this that I put into this article, which I called
"Trifles Today and Treasures Tomorrow." And this, I think,
appeared first in the Saturday Review of Literature, also
at a price of something like forty-five dollars, and then it
was purchased in Reader' s Digest. It was pretending to be a
digest of the best stories appearing in other magazines in

210

the country, but they had found that in order to maintain
a certain level of the type of story they wanted (which
Ferguson said to me was a story that would interest the
average streetcar conductor in the United States; now,
that dates them very much — you'd have to go a long way to
find a streetcar conductor now) , they had to resort to
this policy of inspiring stories, planting them in other
magazines, and then buying them from the other magazines
and reprinting them. It was a very nice little arrange-
ment.

This article brought me an enormous flood of letters,
over 5,000 letters in all. I never was able to answer
them all, but I did answer quite a few, and I got a number
of very good things. I got an original Audubon pastel. I
don't remember all of the things I got, but one of the
most interesting was a twenty-five-page letter from Timothy
Pickering. [He] had been postmaster general and quartermaster
general [among] many other things under Washington during the
Revolution and during his first administration. [The letter was]
written after Washington had died, giving Timothy Pickering's
reasons why George Washington should not have a monument
erected in his honor. It was a characteristic letter, it
turned out: it seemed that Timothy Pickering was a man of
many grievances who enjoyed his grievances hugely, and he
also was a man who felt that people of less talent and less

211

ability had been selected for higher office and honored,
when he was more deserving. So he stated in this letter
that George VJashington had never made any of the important
strategic decisions during the Revolutionary War (they'd
all been made by General [Nathaneal] Greene) , that he was
a man who looked very well in the saddle and on the plat-
form, but was a man of very limited ability to make deci-
sions or judgments, and that all this was a great myth.
Well, there were many other letters; I never got them all
answered. One of the more interesting letters was from a
gentleman in Kentucky who said that he liked the tone of
my letter and that he didn't have any rare books, but he
wanted his daughter to go to Hollywood--she was a beautiful
eighteen-year-old girl--and could he send her to me, because
he knew from the tone of my article that I was an honorable
man and would see that she was protected from the lures of
Hollywood. I never could figure out whether this one hadn't
been written by one of my friends as a practical joke.
GARDNER: She never showed up?

ZEITLIN: No, she never showed up, thank God. But a number
of people did, most of them who had things which were worth-
less, and it was very pathetic and caused me a great deal
of distress to see these people come in. One of them was
an old gentleman from VJisconsin who'd read this portion
about the Overland map, and borrowed money and came across

212

the country to try and sell me a map, and it wasn't
worth fifty cents. So there was quite a bit of that.
Some people were very graceful about it and took it in
good spirit, and others were very much upset and felt
that I had misled them.

But in any event, this sort of set the style for
collecting ephemera. It stimulated people into keeping
not only first editions of famous books but first
appearances of significant articles and magazines or
significant pamphlets. I suggested that people should
save things like the old commercial almanacs that the
baking powder people used to give out, and the ladies'
cookbooks from the church sewing circle. This article
really did stimulate, I think, the whole general movement
towards collecting the sort of thing that was looked
upon as being insignificant and of very little value.
Later on. Van Allen Bradley started a column in the
Chicago Daily News called "Gold in Your Attic," and that
was a direct descendant of the thing that this article
started. It was, of course, very useful to me because a
great many people read Reader' s Digest, and I think that
if I had known how to exploit this, I could have done a
great deal better than I did out of it. I think if I
had systematically sent somebody around the country to
follow up these letters to the various writers from which

213

they came, I would have gotten a lot more stuff; and the
curious thing is that for twenty-five years afterwards,
people would pick up that article and write me about
things. It continued to bring stuff in for a long, long
time.

GARDNER: Now, I knew about the poetry, but I wasn't aware
that you wrote other articles. You said they were in
local publications. What were some of those?
ZEITLIN: Well, the other day I picked up something I had
done in 1927 for Publishers Weekly on how we promoted
fine-press books and developed an interest in the collecting
of press books. I did an article (and I can't remember just
where it was now) for one of the Southern California maga-
zines— it may have been Arts and Architecture — on the book
as a work of art. And later I wrote an article for Arts and
Architecture called "What Is Planning?" I became interested
in the whole business of housing and planning, read a good
deal about it, and then wrote this piece, which was noticed
by a number of architectural schools. And reprints had to
be made and sent out to places like the school of architec-
ture at Harvard, and so on. Then I did a column for Arts
and Architecture here that was entitled "Doubletalk, " and
this was an analysis of such things as the current attack
that the American Medical Association had launched against
the advocates of health insurance, social security, and the

214

idea of a national health system. It's ridiculous to
think now how far we've come since then. They had printed
a brochure which was being distributed through the drug-
stores all over the country which was a direct attack
upon the advocates of health insurance, social security,
state-supported health services, and even such simple
things as group medicine. And I tried to make a semantical
analysis of this; that's what the substance of these
articles were--attempts at semantical analysis of different
forms of propaganda. And the L .A. County Medical Association
Journal got ahold of this--or some member did--and they
published an editorial attacking me quite violently, saying
that the County Medical Association Library had been a good
customer of mine, and here I was biting the hand that fed me.
I had advanced my thesis as a sort of a counterattack, to
the effect that the good old family doctor had contributed
very little to the reduction of mortality from the great
killers, but that it had been state-supported researchers,
some of whom weren't medical men at all--like Pasteur who,
with the help of public funds, had provided the great dis-
coveries which had reduced death from smallpox, diphtheria,
and all of the infectious diseases. And this they really
pounced on.

So the first thing the trustees of the Los Angeles
County Medical Association wanted to do was see that I was

215

made to resign from my job as the secretary of the Barlow
Society for the History of Medicine, an organization which
I had helped found, and for which I wrote the constitution
and bylaws. Much to my surprise, I learned a number of
years later that my chief def endant--the man who had stood
up for me and refused to let the motion go through — was a
man by the name of Dr. Donald Charnock, who was as con-
servative a Republican as ever existed, but who just believed
fundamentally that I had the right to speak my piece and that
it would be an admission of error if the [L.A.] County
Medical Association took this step. So I was rebuked by an
editorial in the L.A. County Medical Association Journal, but
I was not asked to resign. And they did not take away their
book business from me, although for a while they stopped
buying from me. In more recent years, I have sold very little
to the Los Angeles County Medical Association.
GARDNER: For any particular reason?

ZEITLIN: For no particular reason except that the members of
the library board were not the kind of people who were inter-
ested in the history of medicine or in expanding their his-
torical collection. They had bought a great many sets of
journals from me in the earlier days — that is, in the thirties
and perhaps early forties--but then they had reached their
capacity so far as the number of journals they could house.
They also didn't have the funds to continue to fill in the

216

gaps in their journals, which I had made a strong drive
to fill in. But it was a very good working relationship
while it lasted, and it was good for me, and it was good
for them, too, because it helped to build a good medical
reference library. And the Barlow Society for the History
of Medicine has continued to exist, by some peculiar
miracle. It never has elections; it never has meetings
of its members or board for other purposes except to hold
the annual George Dock lecture. But it does go on and,
somehow or another, has remained as a paper entity.
GARDNER: Well, if that's all your writing. . . .
ZEITLIN: Well, as I say, I was writing this column for
Arts and Architecture. I wrote about books for places
like the Publishers Weekly and in some of the other
magazines around here that weren't very important. Then
I published a poem in the San Francisco Review, I think
it was called--it was one of these short-lived literary
magazines in San Francisco — for which I was given a prize.
And all these things managed to get noticed and help build
up a reputation for me. The whole point was that I wasn't
doing something so very great or special, but nobody else
in the book business was doing even as much.
GARDNER: Well put. [laughter] Well, in 1938 you made a
major move away from Sixth Street to Carondelet.
ZEITLIN: Yes, in 1937 Jake Zeitlin Books became a corpora-
tion. It was a very poorly managed operation. I think it

217

must have been 1935 that a friend of mine, Oscar Moss,
who was an accountant, advised me that my business had
to have something done to it to feed some capital into
it, and the only thing to do was to incorporate; and
that, therefore, I should try and get some friends to
advance some money to help me put some capital into the
business. But the whole point was that the total amount
that we capitalized for, in addition to the worth of my
business, was $10,000; and $10,000 was hardly enough to
see a downtown business through a rather difficult time.
And so we struggled along. I was able to make a few
good sales and save the day from time to time. I sold
some rather large items to Hugh Walpole, who was out here
working for the movies at that time. And I had the manu-
scripts of D.H. Lawrence to sell, and I sold quite a few
of those (not a great many, considering how many I had
and how important they were) . One way or another, we
managed to just about keep our doors open, but it became
apparent that we couldn't any longer maintain a staff
and keep going at the level which we were trying to main-
tain. And then the owners of the property served notice
on us in 1938 that they were going to raise the rent
substantially. This place that I was in at 705 1/2 West
Sixth Street was really a very beautifully designed place
that Lloyd Wright had done for me, with a balcony, with a

218

very original style of shelving and decoration, and so
on. It had a nice, small gallery in which we held a
number of good exhibitions. We had one exhibition that
Kennedy sent out, of first-rate Rembrandts and Diirers,
which I wish I had now. V7e had the first show on the
West Coast of Kathe Kollwitz. We showed the work of
people like Magritte and a number of other important
artists of the time. VJe had exhibitions of photographers.
I carried and sold continuously the work of Edward Weston.
I had a good working relationship with the Walker Gallery
in New York; had drawings and watercolors by people like
Thomas Hart Benton and John Curry; and original drawings,
as well as lithographs, of George Bellows. In addition,
I would show local people like Millard Sheets and Tom
Craig, Milfred Zornes, Phil Paradise, and quite a number
of others of the Southern California watercolor school,
which was coming into being at that time. Because of
these exhibitions, my shop attracted a great many of the
people interested in the arts, the younger people who
were looking for a place to show their work. I also
utilized good printers and good design in all of the
printed matter that I sent out--the catalogs--and I think
the distinction of our printing, the kind of exhibitions
that we held, did an awful lot to offset the fact that
the business was very poorly managed, and that kept us

219

alive. But finally the time came when we had to go
somewhere, and I appealed to a friend of mine by the
name of A.G. Beaman, who was also my insurance man.
A.G. Beaman was a sort of an unofficial greeter for all
the literary people, the artists, the collectors who
came to town. If a man like A. Edward Newton came to
town, it was A.G. Beaman who made it his business to
take him around, see that he was entertained, and see
that he was taken from one speaking engagement to another,
and to meet all the collectors and bookshops. He knew
everyone in the burgeoning world of literary and artistic
activity--all on the fringes of it, I'd rather say. It
was one way that he attracted business (he specialized
in fine-arts insurance and so on) , but he was a very good-
hearted man and very much concerned about people like
myself. He was sort of a counterpart of Albert Bender in
San Francisco, who was a great patron, and fortunately
fared better so far as finances were concerned and was
able to be a patron more successfully. But he was a good
man. And he in turn enlisted the help of John Anson Ford.
The Otis Art Institute, which was owned and operated by
Los Angeles County, had taken over, in addition to the
property of the original Harrison Gray Otis house, the
property next door which had belonged to Harrison Gray
Otis's onetime friend but later archenemy, E.T. Earl, the

220

founder of the Pacific Fruit Express and the Los Angeles
Express, a rival newspaper which was founded out of
spite by E.T. Earl. E.T. Earl had built a beautiful
house on the corner of Carondelet and VJilshire, and in
accordance with the style of the times, he had a fine
carriage house in back, two stories — upstairs where the
servants lived, and downstairs they kept the horses and
the carriages. And this carriage house was ivy-covered
and had a curved brick driveway coming up to it. It was
obvious this was a dream for a bookshop. And so, at the
suggestion of Gay Beaman, and with the help of John Anson
Ford, I decided that the way to avoid the problem of
increased rents and the way to stop trying to be a down-
town bookshop was to move away from the busy downtown
area out here, to give more exhibitions, to deal more in
rare books, to send out catalogs, and sort of set the
style for an antiquarian book business which was not
dependent on the street. And the other advantage was
that the rent was only something like sixty-five dollars
a month. So, with the help of some contractor friends, I
got a design by Walter Bearman, who had come out here to
head the new school for industrial design that was being
propagated in Pasadena, backed mostly by Susannah Dakin
and then enthusiastically pressed forward by Dr. Remsen
Bird, the ebullient president of Occidental College who

221

supported a great many things, sometimes with more
enthusiasm than good foresight. But Romsen Bird was a
warm-hearted man, a man capable of enlisting support.
So, with the help of all these people, I closed the
downtown shop and moved out on Carondelet Street. In
1938 we held an opening there, sent out an announcement
with a map — Paul Julian drew the map, and Gregg Anderson
designed the brochure, and it was printed by Anderson and
Ritchie--which went out to people inviting them to the
opening. It attracted an enormous number of people. I
asked Helen Brown, the wife of Phil Brown, to cater this
for me. She had come out here and she and Phil Brown had
gotten married. She knew a great deal about food and
cookery, and she said she wanted to start a catering
business. So I said, "Why don't you start by doing some-
thing to help this affair? People will come, they will
taste whatever it is that you provide, and maybe you'll
get some business out of it." She produced the most
marvelous shrimp Americain sauce which everybody raved
about. We had wine. I remember Phil Hanna sitting up
beside the bowl of sauce and dipping shrimp into it until
he literally had to be hauled away. So it did bring her
to the attention of a lot of the gourmets in the community,
and started her off with my mailing list and with the
chance to show what she could do. She did become a very

222

successful caterer, and her husband and she wrote some
cookbooks together. She died. Phil is now the adver-
tising manager for Jurgensen's [Grocery Co.], and is
really a noted authority on food and wine.
GARDNER: He remained in the book business for a long
time, didn't he?

ZEITLIN: Oh, yes. He was in the book business in
Pasadena with the son of Charles Yale. Charles Yale
had been the manager of Dawson's Book Shop, and then
he left Dawson's and opened a bookshop of his own in
Pasadena. His son came in, and then later Philip Brown,
who had come out here from Owatonna, Minnesota, with
Karl Zamboni. Zamboni had worked for me altogether
about ten years, the brightest and most promising of
all the young bookmen that ever worked for me--a man
that really, I think, could have become and should
have become the outstanding bookman on the West Coast.
Brown came out, and I think he worked for a while on
West Sixth Street for Bunster Creeley at the Abbey
Book Shop, and then he joined the Yales, and later it
became Yale and Brown. Philip Brown practically carried
on the business; unfortunately, Phil Yale, his partner,
became an alcoholic, and gradually they separated, and
the business was finally closed down. But, by that time,
Philip Brown and his wife had successfully established a

223

catering business, and Philip had also gotten a job writing
gastronomic articles for Jurgensen's bulletin. He went
ahead and has really become quite a distinguished person.
GARDNER: Anyway, back to Carondelet. . . .
ZEITLIN: VJell, Carondelet Street opened with this small
gastronomic triumph, and a great many people came, I must
say, to the opening, and I continued there. But just before
Pearl Harbor, one of the men who had become a stockholder —
his name was Preston Harrison--and Oscar Moss, who had been
my advisor and who originally urged me to incorporate, were
so hostile to each other that it became a battle of nerves;
and I was in between, and I got so I couldn't function. I
went to bed with stomach ulcers, and it became obvious that
the business could not go on. So I went to a lawyer friend
of mine, a man who had been very supportive and generous to
me, a man who had been a tremendously successful lawyer in
the oil-lease world, L.R. Martineau. I went to him and I
said, "VJhat am I going to do? I can't go on this way." And
he said, "You're not worth a damn this way. Nobody would
invest another cent in you because you're not your own man.
If you were your own man, I'm sure that a lot of other people
would feel like I do. But my advice to you is get rid of
this. Liquidate it. If you end up broke, you'll be better
off." So I think it was 1942 that I finally called in an
attorney, who in turn undertook the settlement. Now, I

224

turned over assets enough to him to completely pay off
all the creditors, but what I didn't know then is that
lawyers who operate in this kind of a business, in the
world of liquidating businesses, don't usually manage
them for the benefit of the creditors; they manage them
for the benefit of themselves and their friends.

225

TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO

SEPTEMBER 29, 1977 and
OCTOBER 4, 1977

ZEITLIN: I published a notice in the Publishers VJeekly
and, at the same time, sent out a letter to all the cred-
itors advising them that I would personally pay off the
balance of anything that wasn't paid by the receiver. And
later I did pay 100 percent of every claim there was against
the firm that I could get anyone to file. My greatest
difficulty in that was to get my biggest creditors to file,
like Maggs Brothers, who simply didn't want to add to my
burden by filing any claim at all. They finally did, at my
own request, and engaged a lawyer who filed a claim. In
any event, I came out of it with the corporation wiped clean
and no money and all of my employees gone. I had a couple
of friends who lent me, I think, one of them $300 and
another $250. I'd been able at the auction to buy back with
my friends' money some of the books that had been part of
the stock, but the major part of the books were gone, so I
had to go out and buy stock again. I had to restore the
confidence of my customers, and I had to produce enough
working capital to keep going.
GARDNER: How did you do that?

ZEITLIN: I don't know. I still haven't figured it out. It
was really a miracle. Josephine [Ver Brugge Zeitlin] worked

226

hard. I ran hard from one customer to another with a
bag full of books. I had some credit with printers, got
out some lists and catalogs. I had one particular friend,
and that was John Valentine, who provided the capital
with which to buy a couple of large libraries, and it was
out of those libraries that I got my start again.

One of them was a library up in the San Joaquin Valley
of a big industrial concern called the Chemurgic Corporation.
The war came to an end in 1945, and shortly afterwards the
Chemurgic Corporation must have gotten into difficulties.
I had a letter from them asking me if I would be interested
in a set of chemical abstracts, and I didn't answer the
letter. One day I got a phone call from a man up there who
said, "We wrote you asking you if you were interested in a
set of chemical abstracts. We're about to hold a sale of
this entire library up here." And I said, "Have you got a
library? Have you got more than chemical abstracts?" And
he said, "Oh, yes, we've got thousands of volumes of impor-
tant journals--scientif ic and technical journals--and a
complete library dealing largely with physics and chemistry."
So I went up there. I got in a car and drove up that night,
and I got there the next day in the morning. The man who
was in charge of liquidating this firm, who was supposed to
be representing the bank, was very much irritated to see
that I had arrived. Some other member of the office staff

227

had called me because he saw that something funny was
going on. And what was going on, I learned, was that
the liquidator of this company had made a deal with a
chemical company in the Bay Area to sell them the entire
library for something like $2,800, and their bid had
already gone in.

The bids were going to be closed at one o'clock that
day, and I quickly looked around and I saw that this was
a fantastically good library, and that you could get
$2,800 out of the first set you sold. So I called up John
Valentine, and I said, "John, there's a library up here,
and it's fantastic. It's a great collection, and I would
like to bid $4,200 for it, and I haven't got any money."
I said, "I have to walk in with a check if I buy it." He
said, "You go ahead and write the check. The money will be
in your bank."

And I waited until five minutes before one o'clock and
walked into this administrator's office and said, "Here is
my offer of $4,200. Well, the man was furious. He had set
the time for the closing of bids. He told me to get out of
his office, and he tried to reach the competing bidder whom
he had already made a deal with to let him have it for
$2,800. One o'clock passed, and he came to the door, and
he called me in and he said, "You son of a bitch, you've
bought it." It took about four big trucks and semis to haul

228

this collection out of that place. We filled the entire
garage of the carriage house, and we filled the basement
of a place I had rented over on Alvarado Street with
these journals and books. This was the time when Los
Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford were all buying as rapidly
as they could to try and build up technical libraries in
order to develop all of the processes involved in the
making of the atomic bomb. And I had managed to establish
a contact with the people who were doing the buying for
these libraries. I'd been invited to go up and see them.
They had sent me their want lists. They had given me
exclusive rights to go out and buy whole sets for them,
and I bought things from places like Finland and all over
the world, and had them flown in. It was another one of
these lucky breaks which gave me the opportunity to build
up a business in the field of technical books and journals.
GARDNER: That's amazing. So the years on Carondelet were
difficult years.

ZEITLIN: They were very difficult years, but they were
also the years which pulled us out of the hole, primarily
because Josephine had founded, on her own, a periodical
business called Zeitlin Periodicals.

GARDNER: Maybe before you go into that (we'll come back
to that, I think) , we ought to introduce Josephine into
the narrative at this point, because I don't think you've

229

really talked about her.

ZEITLIN: No, there's a lot to be said about Josephine
and the role that she played, because, in truth, I
didn't take her into my business; she took me into her
business. She had started a separate business before we
were married which dealt in periodicals, and I had
encouraged her to do this. There's more to tell about
how this came about. The important thing is that when
Jake Zeitlin, Incorporated, was liquidated, we then
started a new firm which was a merger of Ver Brugge
Books and Jake Zeitlin, and that was Zeitlin and Ver
Brugge.

GARDNER: Well, why don't you tell the story of how she
arrived in your life. I know that exists in other places,
but you can tell it briefly.

ZEITLIN: Well, this is a story I wouldn't really want
to tell too briefly, but I can say that it was the most
important thing that happened in my life to sort of turn
me into a much more whole person than I was before, and
to give me the solid continuity and backing which I
needed in order to make a businessman out of me--and to
give me a sense of security.

While I was still on West Sixth Street, in the summer
of 1937, I received a letter of an application for a job,
and in it, the person writing the letter described them-

230

self as a young woman, approximately five foot, eight
inches tall, blue-eyed, dark hair, and personable. And
she had a bachelor degree from Park College in Missouri
and then had done graduate work at the University of
Iowa in English literature, and had been teaching school
in Missouri and Kansas. She had always wanted to work
in a bookshop. She knew something about bookkeeping,
she knew something about business because she had helped
her father in his hardware business in Reading, Kansas,
and she would very much appreciate an interview. I
was very much impressed with the style of this letter
and also with the description of herself as five foot
eight, blue-eyed, black hair, and personable, and said
to my secretary, "Well, I haven't got a job, but this
Miss Josephine Ver Brugge, who wrote this letter, is
entitled to an interview. So why don't you tell her to
come in and see me if she can tomorrow afternoon."

And the next afternoon, in came this very beautiful
Dutch girl. I sat her down in my office and looked at
her, and I said, "I know I asked you in here because I
thought of you as a possibility for a job, but now that
I've had a look at you, I'm not going to give you a job.
I like you too well. But don't you leave town or I'll
be on your pa's doorstep by the time you get back to
Kansas. Come across the street and let's have a cup of

231

coffee." So we sat down across the street, and then
we talked some more, and then I went back and called
up my friend Remsen Bird and told him that I had a very
remarkable young woman here that I wanted to see in a
job somewhere, and could he suggest something. And he
said, "I think they might need a secretary at the Haynes
Foundation, but I don't know whether this job is going to
be open right away or not. However, you tell her to go
and see Miss Mumford, the lady who is the secretary of
the foundation. And in the meantime, just sit tight."
So with that, Josephine decided not to go back to Kansas
to her schoolteaching job. She went and got a job at
Bullock's, where they told her they were going to train
her as an executive. I think the job must have paid
something like twenty-two dollars a week, and this was
the way that Bullock's had of getting top material for
low prices, with the idea that they were going to be
given an opportunity to become executives. Most of these
people never got out of the credit office or the book-
keeping office, the little jobs that they were locked into.
Well, she remained there for a while, until finally she
was asked to come over and go to work for the Haines
Foundation.

And while she was working there, I went up to San
Francisco and visited my friend Nathan Van Patten, who

232

was the librarian of the Lane Medical Library as well
as the Stanford University Library. And Nathan Van
Patten took me up into the attic of the Lane Medical
Library, and here there were thousands of journals and
duplicate books, and he said, "We're going to have to
get these out of here, and I think I'm going to have
to dump them." And I said, "Well, before you dump
them, what will you take for them?" And he said, "Well,
what about $600?" And I said, "V7ell, give me a little
time." I went back down, and I talked to Josephine and
told her there was a great opportunity to buy this stock
of back files of medical journals. She had a little money
that she had gotten from her mother's estate, and she
rented a store building on Seventh Street for something
like seventy-five dollars a month. There was a man who
had been working at UCLA Library by the name of John B.
Lee who needed a job, and John B. Lee came to work for
something like no more than $100 a month. A friend by ,
the name of Preston Tuttle, and John Lee, and I went up
to San Francisco, tied this library into bundles, and
we agreed to pay Mr. Van Patten $100 a month for six
months. Josephine scraped together enough money to pay
for the carriage of the books and stuff down, and they
were dumped in the middle of this store that was rented
on Seventh Street — on the floor into a mountain.

233

We then proceeded to go out and buy apple boxes
(in those days you could buy apple boxes for five to
ten cents apiece) , and we put the apple boxes together
and made bookshelves out of them. We got a copy of the
Union List of Serials, and with that, she and John Lee
(she working at night and after hours) proceeded to sort
this mountain of journals and put them into order and
to catalog them all according to the Union List of Serials.
They had printed postcards in which they offered to all
the libraries listed in the Union List of Serials such
pieces which they had as were lacking in these libraries.
They got out mimeographed lists, and the first thing you
know, they were doing a little business. And that was
the beginning of Zeitlin Periodicals. With her hard work
and with John Lee's expertise and devotion and hard work,
they were able to bring that up to the point where she
could quit her job at the Haines Foundation and carry this
on, on enough of a paying basis. And later, after we were
married in 1939, and after Jake Zeitlin, Incorporated, was
liquidated, we merged our two businesses. But we main-
tained a separate location for the journals and the
periodicals.

And the journals and periodicals were for quite a
while a substantial part of the business; they provided a
very large business because we had very little competition.

234

Walter Johnson had not come into the scene, H.P. Kraus
had not gone into the periodical business, and it was
possible then, with hard work and with the luck of getting
this stock, to start a business. On top of that, the
Chemurgic Corporation stock contained a number of rather
complete files of practically every important technical
journal that could be had, and a great many of the reprints
that were done by Edwards Brothers under the license of
the alien property custodian. We built up a technical-book
business, mostly out-of-print technical books and out-of-
print technical journals, which really provided more of the
basic capital which we developed for the rare-book business.
GARDNER: How long did you maintain the periodicals?
ZEITLIN: VJe maintained the periodical business until
approximately, I think it must have been, twelve years ago,
and then we sold it to our nephew. We enabled him to buy
it; we sold it to him on very liberal terms so that he could
pay it off out of the earnings from the business. But it
became a management problem. We couldn't find capable,
trustworthy employees, people that we could really with
confidence put to work running a periodical business. And
we had a choice either of closing it or closing the rare-
book business, and we decided to close the periodical business.
GARDNER: Was that on La Brea then?
ZEITLIN: No, we were on West Adams at the time--that is.

235

the periodical business was on West Adams at the time.
We transferred it to Stanley, and he ultimately moved
it.

GARDNER: Well, since we've gotten you through
Carondelet. . . . See how quickly we're moving? We're
up to 1948 already.

ZEITLIN: Oh, not quite '48. We're up through 1939,
1942.

GARDNER: And then through past the war, when you're
buying . . .

ZEITLIN: Through '45, when I was buying the Chemurgic
Corporation library. I must say that without the help
of John Valentine, the wonderful friendship and confi-
dence that he had in me, I would never have been able
to take advantage of these opportunities and to build
up the stocks that were necessary in order for us to
develop a real business. It was John Valentine who
provided the funds not only for the Chemurgic library
but for the [Charles] Kofoid collection, a collection
of duplicates of books that had been left to the Uni-
versity of California — 28,000 books on the natural
sciences and some on the physical sciences--and later,
the collection of books on economics and political
science. Otto Jeidel's library, which I bought in Santa
Barbara. All three of these, which were very crucial.

236

and a fourth one which really launched me into the
rare-science-book business, were all due to the very
wonderful friendship of John Valentine.
GARDNER: What was the fourth one?

ZEITLIN: That was the Herbert Evans library (that was
Herbert Evans number two) . The Herbert Evans library
is a story in itself, and I think that's about all I
can do tonight.

OCTOBER 4, 1977

GARDNER: Now, as I mentioned, I thought we'd begin
today, since we covered the Carondelet shop last time,
with your move to La Cienega Boulevard. How did that
come about? What made you choose to move?
ZEITLIN: Well, I didn't choose to move. We remained
at 624 South Carondelet from 1938 to 1948, which is a
good, round ten years. I actually opened my downtown
shop in 1928 and moved to Carondelet in 1938, so that at
the end of another decade, it seemed to be the end of a
cycle and the beginning of a new one. What actually
happened was that the property we were occupying was
part of the property belonging to the Otis Art Institute
and that, of course, in turn meant that it was owned and
operated by the county. The E.T. Earl residence was at
the corner of Wilshire and Carondelet, about halfway

237

along the block on the east side of the street. It
was a brick driveway that curved gracefully up to the
front of an old ivy-covered brick carriage house with
high gables. We had maintained our business there for
these ten years.

I think there must have been a number of elements
which contributed to our having to move, but it seemed
that the precipitating element was that I had erected
a sign at the corner of Wilshire and Carondelet, a
swinging sign pointing towards our driveway. The chair-
man of the board of Otis Art Institute (a man who managed
to be chairman of a great many things) was Edward Dickson,
a man who later became chairman of the Regents of the
University of California. Edward Dickson was a rather
narrow-minded man and also had a tremendous sense of
power. He was sort of a little tyrant. He had somehow
or another managed to become the spokesman, as it were,
willing to serve on boards and to participate in all kinds
of cultural community activities on behalf of the "forty
thieves" --people in downtown Los Angeles, mostly, who
have always controlled the destinies of all of the insti-
tutions like the Philhanr.onic Orchestra, the Music Center,
university, and, among other things, the Otis Art Institute,
He had been referred to by one of the great senators from
California, Hiram Johnson, in a public address as "Little

238

Eddie Dickson." Among other things, he had been the
editor of the Los Angeles Express , so he must have
had some talents. At the time when I knew him he was
in a stock brokerage investment business dovmtown, so
he must have, in one way or another, been entrusted
with a considerable financial clout as well as political
power.

During the period when I was at Carondelet Street,
I had been very active in the organization of a Democratic
Club. I had been chairman of the campaign committee of
Helen Gahagan Douglas. I had become involved with the
Political Action Committee of the CIO through an organiza-
tion which was affiliated with them, a group called
Architects and Engineers. (I've forgotten the rest of
the group; they were architectural draftsmen, people that
worked in relation to planning.) And I had written an
article for one of the local magazines which specialized
in architectural and design matters . . .
GARDNER: Arts and Architecture?

ZEITLIN: Arts and Architecture, called "What Is Planning?"
I was adopted by this group, who then made me a member in
full standing of the union, and out of that I was appointed
to be the chairman of the Political Action Committee, and as
chairman of the Political Action Committee, I sat at the
downtown meetings of the Political Action Committee of the

239

CIO. And very soon [I] was heavily involved in local
politics. The CIO carried a substantial political sock
and had a lot to do with the selection of candidates for
Congress. We had a war chest with which we could distrib-
ute funds for the support of people running for the
assembly, for the state senate, for the United States
Congress and for the United States Senate. It was an
important element in California politics at the time,
and, I suppose, indirectly, national politics. Well, it
was pretty heavily dominated by a left-wing group--Slim
[Philip] Connelly, among others--and in the course of
that time. I had helped gain the support of the CIO and
helped elect a city councilman by the name of Ed Davenport.
Ed Davenport turned out to be the worst lemon I ever picked.
He was reactionary, he was crooked, and he was a lush.
What other vices he had I don't know, but he quickly aligned
himself with Forest Lawn Cemetery groups and all the other
groups through whom money was dispersed, and very quickly
he started in on a witch hunt. So that the next time he
ran for city council, I picked a candidate to run against
him, and he resorted to smearing the candidate, who was a
very good man and had "Q" clearance with the armed forces
intelligence. He was a top man, a major in the United
States Army. Ed Davenport was a master of demagoguery. He
was a master of the hanky panky that went with getting

240

elected to office and to staying in office. So he defeated
the candidate that I helped select, Douglas Behrend, and
caused Behrend a great deal of trouble and embarrassment.
In the city council, he announced one day that the
Communists were meeting regularly in my bookshop for the
purpose of defeating him. He tried to get the [Jack B.]
Tenney committee on my neck, and, of course, news of this
filtered into the press, and, I'm sure, got to Eddie Dickson.
So one day, Eddie Dickson came and ordered me to remove my
sign from the corner of Wilshire and Carondelet Street,
which I did very reluctantly. And then he announced that
I had to move, that the county did not wish to extend my
stay there. Well, it was really a very favorable situation
that I had been enjoying. I had the use of the entire
building for something like sixty-five dollars a month for
ten years. Mr. Dickson, I don't think, consulted anybody
else; he just notified me, and then he went to whoever was
in charge of leases and rentals and told them that I had to
go.

GARDNER: Had you had any dealings with him prior to this?
ZEITLIN: Oh, he would come in once in a while to see me,
and he always behaved most amiably, except on the occasion
when he told me I would have to remove my sign.
GARDNER: Did he ever buy any books or art?
ZEITLIN: He had bought some books from me when I was

241

downtown, and it was during that time that Larry Powell,
when he was working for me, had met Edward Dickson. But
he never bought anything substantial either in books or
art.

I had no choice; I had to find a place. I think I
was notified in something like June; I had July, August,
September, and October in which to move, and I immediately
went searching for a place. We were driving along La
Cienega Boulevard one Sunday, and I saw this red barn
which was occupied by Pascal's Antiques. I had always
said that that was the place I would like to have a
bookshop in. Well, the idea of moving a book business
as far out west as La Cienega Boulevard seemed just like
disappearing into the woods. But I had concluded by that
time that my business did not depend so much on the drop-in
trade; it depended upon the letters we wrote and the
announcements and catalogs we got out, and the exhibitions
we held, which would bring people to our place. We had
accumulated a mailing list, and that was our chief asset,
as it should be in every good book business.
GARDNER: Were there bookstores out this way?
ZEITLIN: Oh, there were no bookstores on La Cienega. The
only things there were at all were some antique stores.
And then a fellow by the name of Stoeffen had a framing
shop. His wife, Esther, had some cabinets with decorative

242

prints which she sold to interior decorators and people
who wanted prints to be framed by her husband, and that
was the nearest thing to a bookshop. There wasn't any-
thing between downtown and Beverly Hills that I can
remember.

The red barn was up for sale because the man who
owned the property and who had financed the business,
Ernest Pascal, had somehow fallen out with his brother,
who was managing the business. They had originally
started in to sell American antiques and had built up a
very fine business. Ernest Pascal himself had great
taste and knowledge in American antiques. And then,
for some reason, they switched over to English antiques.
English antiques didn't fit in an old red barn, and there
were other complications of which I know nothing; but in
any event, the brothers fell out and never spoke again,
I understand, and the building was put up for sale by
Ernest Pascal. I got in touch with Pascal, and he wanted
$33,000 for the property. I said to him, "You know, I
don't have enough money to pay a down payment." And he
said, "Well, I'd like to see you there. You've got a
good reputation, and I think you would do well there, and
I think it would improve the neighborhood. So write your
own ticket. Tell me what you can do."

I actually didn't have any money, but I went to

243

Susannah Dakin and told her my situation. Susannah
Dakin lived over in Pasadena at the time. She was one
of the loveliest people I ever knew, and she had been
a friend of mine for a long time. She was a niece of
Sarah Bixby Smith, whose book called Adobe Days I
published, and who was a very dear friend. (Sarah Bixby
Smith was the wife of Paul Jordan-Smith.) Susannah was
interested in art. She was interested in California
history; she wrote a couple of good books on the subject.
And she had a great deal of money. Her mother was
Susannah Bixby Bryant, which meant that she was one of
the Bixbys and had inherited a great deal of Signal Hill
and some of the other oil properties in Long Beach. She
had married a very fine man by the name of Dr. Ernest
Bryant, who had been associated with Dr. John R. Haines.
John R. Haines was the father of the Metropolitan Water
District and the municipal Department of Water and Power,
he was one of the progressives of the era of Spreckels
and some of the other reformers (they were called
"millionaire socialists").
GARDNER: That's the Haines Foundation.
ZEITLIN: He was the founder of the Haines Foundation.
Dr. Bryant was in the office of John R. Haines and partook
of the philosophy of John R. Haines, which was that of
responsible, forward-looking capital. Bryant partook of

244

the general idea of social responsibility but was not
a progressive or pro-labor in politics, whereas John R.
Haines had been very pro-labor in politics and had been
responsible for the enactment in California of the ini-
tiative and referendum and had participated in a great
many progressive political movements. He had been among

those who fought the Southern Pacific, backed up the
str ,'etcar men when they organized their strike against

the streetcar company. So Dr. Bryant was indeed a very
fine man socially, and as a person as well, and Susannah
partook, to a great degree, of his philosophy and of his
character.

Susannah had come in to my shop when she was quite
a young woman, before she had her first child. I remember
she and Arthur Millier and Dr. Remsen Bird and some other
people used to meet and have lunch, and we were always
engaged in little conspiracies. I went to her, and I
told her I had to move; I told her that I had this oppor-
tunity to buy the building on La Cienega Boulevard and
that I didn't have any money. And she asked me how much
I thought it would take to make a down payment. I said I
thought I could make the down payment for $9,000; that
they would accept that and let me meet the other in a
series of payments in addition to the regular installments,
She said, "You go down to our bank, to the bank where we

245

«

do business--the Security bank--and see Mr. So-and-so,
and I will tell him about you." I went down, and he
lent me the money on my note, which was, of course,
countersigned by her. So I was then able to go back
to Mr. Pascal and make him a proposal of paying $9,000
the first year, so much a month for a year, and then
meeting another substantial payment, and so on for three
successive years. Afterwards, I would pay so much a
month. 7-ind he was satisfied to let me come in and do
that. My next job was to bring the building up to
standard, because as long as Pascal occupied it, and he
didn't need to get a permit to remodel, everything was
all right; but as soon as I wanted to move in and occupy
it, I had to get a permit.

246

TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE
OCTOBER 4, 19 7 7

GARDNER: VJe'll continue now with a description of the
barn.

ZEITLIN: The floor was three-quarter-inch tongue-and-
groove yellow pine (the kind of v/ood you can't get now),
but it had to be all taken up. The entire foundation
had to be reconstructed. I got ahold of a contractor who
had been recommended to me by Mr. Pascal, who had done
work for Pascal. His name was Paul Lamport, and he later
became a city councilman. V7ell, Mr. Lamport agreed to
take out the floor and put in the new foundation and do
the necessary reconstruction work. He pulled out all of
the flooring, threw it down on the ground, and he and his
workmen walked away and left the thing for about two
months without doing a thing. In the meantime, the dead-
line was approaching when I was having to move. I went
to my attorney, and I said, "What can I do?" And he
said, "What kind of a contract did you write? Did you
get a completion clause into it?" And I said no. And
he said, "Contractors have so much work these days that
they don't have to please anybody." (It was right after
the end of the war.) He said, "All you can do is speak
nicely to him and see if you can't get him to come back
to work on the job and get his work completed." Well, I

247

went back to Mr. Pascal, told him about the situation,
got hold of Lamport, and Pascal, who had given Lamport
other work and had other jobs at his disposal; finally
got Mr. Lamport to finish the place, but only about
September 1, so that I had a month in which to move
everything .

I rented a big five-ton truck and hired a couple
of men from the slave market, which used to be down at
the corner of Third and La Brea, where men would stand
out on the sidewalk and wait to be picked up for odd
jobs. And I also got ahold of my old faithful, Bill
Ulevick, who really should deserve some notice. Bill
was a Czech who never had any education, grew up some-
where in South Dakota, never had a good job, never made
any money, but somehow or another managed his life in
such a way that he now, as an old man, is able to live
on his social security and the odd jobs he gets. He
knows how to take advantage of every benefit that he
can properly and legally enjoy. He's part of the oldsters
groups, and so he is enjoying a great life. He also knew
where things were happening, and he had curiosity enough
so that he would take his bicycle and go on a day's ride
just to discover where a new freeway was going, or to see
try-outs of new automobile equipment, things like that.
I've always admired him for somehow or another, with all

248

the handicaps and the limitations he had, having worked
out his life as well as he has. But he was always avail-
able to me to do lifting and carrying, packing, hauling,
shipping. And on many occasions, when I got hold of a
big library, it was Bill Ulevick who saved my neck and
made it possible for me to pack and load it and bring it
down. So Bill Ulevick and one crew stayed at the shop
and packed boxes. VJhen I arrived with the truck, they
would load them, and I would drive across town to La
Cienega and unload them, and the men there would then
stack them up. So that between the two groups, I managed
to move the entire shop by going back and forth, day after
day, for what I think must have been an entire month, and
finally got everything moved. We had the building repainted.
We bought apple boxes and lined the sides, put strips on
the front, stained them, made them look like shelving. We
built two bedrooms upstairs and our living room, and we
enclosed the back section, and that is where we moved in
and lived for quite a few years.

In I believe it was October of 1948, we opened our
shop on La Cienega Boulevard. I must add that it was not
only because of Susannah Dakin that I was able to move and
open up, but a great deal of the credit for providing me with
the day-by-day funds that I needed, for giving me the moral
support as well, goes to a man by the name of John Valentine.

249

John Valentine was a man who had gone to Williams College.
He'd grown up in Chicago, had gone out to Decatur,
Illinois, and he had made what must have been a substan-
tial amount of money as an oil distributor. He was an
enterpriser in many ways, and he acquired master leases
to some important property. His heart was in books, how-
ever. He'd been in World War I, and following the war,
he had remained in Italy as consul in one of the Italian
towns for some time. He was a man with a great deal of
feeling, outwardly not very impressive--he was quite con-
ventional in his appearance--very frugal, very much aware
of the value of money and very well able to manage money.
He had financed the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago —
his partner was Ralph Newman--and he had kept it going
during the period when Ralph Newman was in the services.
When Newman returned and was able to take over management
again, John Valentine made an arrangement which allowed
Newman to buy the business. Valentine had a great deal
of knowledge of Lincoln, middle western history, and
middle western literature. He was very knowledgeable not
only about the early history of the Middle West and the
Civil War and the literary men of the early days of
Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and so on, but he also had
known personally and had formed an outstanding collection
of the books of people like Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg,

250

Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson.
He knew their works, and he loved them, and he read them
and collected them. He was also a very ardent Democrat
and a great collector of anything that had to do with
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He started the Franklin
Delano Roosevelt collectors' Newsletter, and he built up
quite a large group of collectors of FDR material. He
encouraged the publication of bibliographies by men like
[Ernest J.] Halter and books about Roosevelt. He became
the outstanding dealer in the country in that material
after he moved out here. He was a very warm, outgoing,
sprightly man, and to me he was really the difference
between failure and success. John, for some reason, took
a liking to me; he spent a great deal of time--and for a
short while he actually worked for me — in the bookshop.
But, of course, I had no business (and he knew it) employ-
ing a man that was so much my superior as a businessman,
and financially much above me. But I think he did all
this out of sheer devotion, and it was John Valentine who
came forward with loans from time to time when I had
opportunities to buy collections, provided the money and
was patient about getting it paid back, and was very
generous about the terras on which he lent it. No one
person has ever contributed so much toward helping me
recover from the failure of 1942 and getting back on my

251

feet as John Valentine.

He was good company, too, and we made a great many
very enjoyable trips together. Among other things, we
drove all night up to Berkeley once to bid for the
duplicates from the library of Dr. Charles Kofoid, who
had given a large collection of books--hundreds of
thousands of books — to the University of California
biological sciences. He'd had an arrangement with the
university: they provided him with the space and the
clerical help for forming a great library on the bio-
logical sciences. He was an outstanding protozoologist,
but in addition to his accomplishments in this field, he
was an absolute madman about books, and he accumulated
them by the thousands . He bought whole bookstores at
the time of the inflation in Germany and Holland, and he
had them shipped to the University of California; the
life sciences building gave him a whole section of one
floor into which he crammed these books, and [he] had
help with the cataloging. The understanding was that he
was to leave the books to the university upon his death.
So he very happily pursued the dream of every bibliophile-
buying and buying and buying--and the university enjoyed
the benefits of all this by accumulating this library.

The duplicates from the library amounted to 28,000
books at a minimum, and these 28,000 books were put up at

252

auction. He had provided that all duplicates were to
be sold for the benefit of a fund to be used to help the
university professors who married young and who wanted
to have children: because he and his wife, when he had
started in his academic career, had been too poor to
have children when they were young, and later they couldn't
have them. It was his idea that the money coming from
this fund could be used as loans to young professors and
their wives who wanted children. He had made money, among
other ways, by buying some real estate along Wilshire
Boulevard way out beyond where the pavement ended, along
between La Brea and Fairfax, which later became known as
the Miracle Mile. But when he bought it, there v;eren't
many people who wanted it. It became very valuable later
on, and this provided a great deal of money with which to
buy the books that he had accumulated, and for other endow-
ments which he left.

John Valentine drove up to San Francisco, a strenuous
drive, all night long; he wouldn't stop to rest. He
finally died when he was only sixty years old because he
was a man who drove himself too hard. He had this middle
western Calvinistic spirit, this form of self-denial,
this feeling about frugality which was in some ways really
unnecessary. If we went into a restaurant to have lunch
or dinner, his check always came out fifty cents to a

253

dollar less than mine, and he seemed to eat just as well
as I did.

So it was John Valentine, to a great extent, along
with the loan that Susannah Dakin made me, that made it
possible for us to move from Carondelet Street to La
Cienega. At the end of a year, Susannah Dakin sent me
a check for $9,000. She said, "I want you to take this
down to the bank and pay off the loan which they made
you and which I guaranteed." She said, "I have invested
a great deal of money in many cultural activities in this
community. Yours seems to be the best investment I've
made, or at least one of the most promising in terms of
the value it has to the community and the promise of
continuity. So it's quite consistent with my idea of
what I should do with my money in supporting cultural
activities for me to do this, and you would be pleasing
me if you would accept this." I remonstrated, but she
insisted, and I can't say that I remonstrated to the point
of returning the check. I did go down and pay off the
note to the bank, and was therefore free of a substantial
encumbrance which might have hampered me later. This was
a fine and wonderful gesture, and she came with her husband
and a couple of friends the night we held our opening of
our new shop on La Cienega Boulevard.
GARDNER: Well, last time you described with a little bit

254

of epicurean detail, what the opening was like on
Carondelet. Did you have a similar sort of thing?
ZEITLIN: We did have an opening on La Cienega Boulevard.
I can't remember the printed notice of the opening,
but hordes of people came, and it was a very enjoyable
event, and there was lots of enthusiasm. But my memory
is very vague about the precise details, except that I
again asked Helen Evans Brown to cater, and by then she
was a very well established caterer and an authority on
cookery, and had published several books.

GARDNER
ZEITLIN
GARDNER
ZEITLIN

So she catered them both then?

She catered both.

That's wonderful.

I don't know whether we repeated the shrimp
Americain which had been the great dish of our first
opening, but we may well have. Can I stop a minute?
[tape recorder turned off] You asked me about book clubs.
GARDNER: Let me ask you formally (as long as we turned
it off and on) . You had membership in many of them,
and I guess we'll touch on them all, but I think we
probably should start with Zamorano since it's the one
of most local interest.

ZEITLIN: I was not a member of Zamorano until very
recently. The fact is, Zamorano had a policy from its
beginning that booksellers were not to be admitted. That

255

was a peculiar policy, considering the fact that the
man who was their first secretary--and really, I think,
the reason for forming the club was Irving VJay. Irving
VJay had been a member of the firm of Way and Williams
Publishers in Chicago, which had produced some very fine
books. He was also a bookseller, and it was he that
introduced Thomas Wise to one of the customers that was
most important in Thomas Wise's career. It was a Major
[Wrenn] , whose collection that he bought from Thomas VJise,
was the core of what later became the great University of
Texas collection. (I will remember his name shortly.) In
any event, Irving Way had come to Los Angeles--I don't
know just when; he must have come in the twenties, late
twenties, I think — and he had made his living by going
around selling books to people who were interested in
building libraries, mostly Spring Street lawyers and busi-
nessmen who sent him from one to the other. He was a
bookish man, he was knowledgeable, and he wrote extremely
well. He wrote a pamphlet for Ernest Dawson which John
Henry Nash printed, and which is still one of the most
charming things ever written about book collecting and
certainly one of the best printed items ever done on bib-
liophily and bibliomania.

Well, a group of men, including Arthur Ellis, who
was an outstanding attorney in those days here; John

256

Treanor, who was head of the Riverside Portland Cement
Company; Will Clary, who was one of the senior members
of O'Melveny and Myers; and A.G. Beaman, who was an
insurance man that I mentioned before, decided that Los
Angeles should have a club that would correspond with
the Roxburghe Club of London, the Grolier Club of New
York, the Rowfant Club of Cleveland, and the Club of
Odd Volumes in Boston. So they resolved to organize
this club. Part of its purpose was to provide an occu-
pation for Irving Way, who was growing older and in fail-
ing health, and so they set up at the University Club a
clubroom which was to be a library. They provided a small
salary for Irving Way, who was to serve as secretary, and
they started in with a group of bookish people, then,
from various professions. They also included Robert
Cowan, who was then the librarian of the Clark Library;
and Henry R. Wagner, who had moved down to Southern
California, was living in San Marino, and who was certainly
one of the outstanding collectors as well as sellers of
collections. Both of them had done what are still the
outstanding bibliographies on California and the Spanish
Southwest. The Overland Route, Plains and the Rockies of
Henry Wagner and the Spanish Southwest, Henry Wagner, are
certainly classics which have not been superseded. And
then they did include C.C. Parker, who had Parker's bookstore

257

on West Sixth Street. He was an old gentleman; he was
what they call "clubbable," and for some reason, they
didn't regard him as a bookseller, even though he was
a bookseller.

GARDNER: There's obviously something else beneath the
surface here--do you want to elaborate?
ZEITLIN: VJell, yes, they didn't want what they felt
might be an element of commercialism in there. They
looked upon Ernest Dawson as not being a "clubbable"
gentleman.
GARDNER: Why?

ZEITLIN: Well, Ernest Dawson, for one thing, had declared
himself to be a communist. He was a very idealistic man.
And for another thing, Ernest Dawson didn't drink, Ernest
Dawson didn't smoke, and Ernest Dawson was really an out-
doorsman: he was a Sierra Clubber rather than a Zamorano
Clubber. And they also just looked upon him really as
too much in trade. They did include Bruce McCallister as
a printer, and they included Leslie Bliss of the Huntington
Library as a member. I don't remember who else among
librarians was included. From time to time, they would
allow booksellers like me to come if some guest insisted
upon their being brought along. They didn't have any
Jewish members for many years; and the first member that I
can remember who was Jewish was Saul Marks, who was brought

258

in because he was obviously an outstanding printer and
a man that was very much respected, and it would have
been a reflection upon the Zamorano Club if they hadn't
brought him in. The only time I came was when people
like Dr. Rosenbach were invited and insisted that they
wanted to bring me, or Frank Hogan was invited and said,
"I'd like to bring Jake Zeitlin." So for a period of
many years, there were no booksellers of the tradesman
variety in the Zamorano Club. In fact, until about five
years ago, when I was asked to join, the official policy
remained intact, in spite of the fact that some of the
leading bookmen from around the world that would come
to Los Angeles would come to see rae, would be my guests,
would spend their time with me while they were here, and
none of the Zamoraners would see them. So I think that
ultimately it got to be a sort of a shame.
GARDNER: The impression I get is that, except for a few
of the members, it was more of a club than a book club.
ZEITLIN: No, it was founded directly for the purpose of
being a book club. It was to encourage the collecting
of books, the exchanging of knowledge about books, to
encourage the publication of bookish works, the biblio-
graphical works such as the Zamorano Eighty, and to sponsor
fine printing — the same ideals as similar book clubs.
GARDNER: Have other book clubs had similar restrictions?

259

ZEITLIN: I don't know. Certainly the great Roxburghe
Club in London had among its earliest members Bernard
Quaritch, and the Grolier Club had had among its members
publishers like Charles Scribner and booksellers like
Dr. Rosenbach. But it was really not until fairly
recently, sometime in the thirties, that David Randall
was made a member of the club, and it became sort of an
overt policy to have booksellers as members of the Grolier
Club in New York. That came about because Charles Scribner,
who was one of the leading members of the Grolier Club and
had been a president, simply put it on the line and said,
"Unless you admit David Randall into the club, I shall
resign and I shall also spread the word among others." So
David Randall was admitted, and from then on, other trades-
men were admitted.

The Zamorano Club had, I suppose, the notion that if
they favored one bookseller and admitted him, other book-
sellers would feel they'd been excluded and would be
resentful. But then they admitted some printers and didn't
admit others. Bruce McCallister, Saul Marks, Ward Ritchie
were members, but a great many other printers in this area
were not invited or admitted to the club, and certainly some
librarians were not invited or admitted. But that was a
kind of a traditional rule in the Zamorano Club up to the
time I was asked if I would accept membership.

260

I was called by Ray Billington, who is a very fine
man — a very warm, outgoing, warmhearted personality.
He asked me if I would accept membership in the Zamorano
Club if I were put up for membership. Well, there evi-
dently had been some scuffling among the members about
this whole matter, and I think that what happened is
that some of them decided that the time had come to make
an issue of it and put it up to the board and make me
the test case. I was invited to attend as a guest, as
I had been in the past, but this time I was invited to
attend as a guest in order that I might be scrutinized.
And I evidently passed. In fact, there was hardly anyone
at any of the meetings that weren't people that I knew
personally and weren't personal friends, so that the whole
question of admission to membership was kind of secondary.
And, frankly, I told Ray Billington at the time he asked
me that it would have meant a lot to me twenty-five years
ago to be made a member of the Zamorano Club and have the
opportunity to mingle with collectors and with the visitors,
to bring my guests to the club, and to feel that I was
part of the community of bookmen other than booksellers.
But that time had now passed, and I really didn't have that
much urge to go out at night to sit and listen to a variety
of speakers, seme of whom might be interesting, and a great
many of whom by now would be dull to me. But on the other

261

hand, I didn't feel that I should refuse because of the
precedent it set. And so I was elected membership, and
at the same time Glen and Muir Dawson were elected, which
I was very glad for. In fact, I've said often before
that the Dawsons were more entitled to membership than
I was, and that the first members among the bookselling
community here in Los Angeles should be the Dawsons. And
they were proposed and elected to membership at the same
time that I was.

GARDNER: Now, you mentioned that Saul Marks was the first
Jewish member of the Zamorano.

ZEITLIN: As far as I know, he was the first Jewish member.
Bob Weinstein, I think, had been a member before, but I
can't remember any others, except an architect by the name
of Gordon Kauffman who had removed himself from all things
Jewish and identification as a Jew a long time ago.
GARDNER: VJere there any notable collectors who might have
been in Zamorano but weren't?

ZEITLIN: Well, no, frankly I can't remember any that
might have been invited and weren't invited; of course, I
don't know all of them. Certainly, men like Elmer Belt
were members. I don't think that Bob Honeyman ever would
have accepted an invitation to membership, because he is
not what they call "clubbable": he doesn't care for that
sort of thing, although he is by far the greatest collector

262

this part of the world has ever known, if you except
Williams Andrews Clark. And I would include Mrs.
Doheny among those that he surpasses, or Mrs. Getz —
not, of course, Henry Huntington — but certainly among
the men who didn't have vast fortunes to spend, he's by
far the most distinguished collector this area has
ever known.

GARDNER: It's an easy move from there to the Book Club
of California. Now, you were a member of that for a
long time.

ZEITLIN: Oh, well, the Book Club of California never
had any restrictions, except at one time they restricted
the number of members; that was more or less a come-on.
In other words, when they couldn't get more than 150
they set the limitation at 200. But the Book Club of
California was started in San Francisco by Albert Bender,
Jim Blake, and one other person whom I can't identify at
this moment. But in any event, it was these three men
who were the organizing committee. (It might have been
John Howell, and it might have been Oscar Lewis, but in
any event, these were the men who started the Book Club
of California.) Their first publication was Robert E.
Cowan's Bibliography of [The History of] California, [and
the Pacific VTest] , which was printed by John Henry Nash.
GARDNER: VJas it a similar organization?

ZEITLIN: Well, yes, the general idea, though, was not
so much having regular meetings and dinners as sponsoring
publications for distribution among the membership. Later
on the Roxburghe Club was formed, which was more of a
social club, like the Zamorano Club. But the Book Club
of California was always open to women. There was no
reason why it shouldn't be; their money was as good as
anybody else's. And it opened up offices on Sutter Street
where they held regular exhibitions. Later it started
publishing a quarterly newsletter. It would get out these
annual (I don't know what they call them) broadsides or
leaflets, which have continued. They get one out every
year on some subject, and it's certainly been a great
supporting force for the publication of finely printed
books, and for publication of books about books. It's
encouraged a great many printers, encouraged scholars,
and it's encouraged collecting. It's been a very fine
organization, and it's continued to have a good tradition
all along. It's remarkable how it's gone on now for, I
suppose, well, certainly over sixty years. The Roxburghe
Club was formed much later, something like 1937.
GARDNER: Did you ever have any connection with that?
ZEITLIN: Oh, yes. I've been a member for many years and
have spoken for them on two occasions — no, I think three
occasions. I spoke once on Galileo, the "Bibliographical

264

Misadventures of Galileo." The other time, I can't
remember the subject. I can remember being there and
speaking, but I'm very vague about the subject. Oh,
yes, it was on Aldous Huxley and Huxley as a critic
of the arts, especially of Brueghel and [Jacques]
Callot. And the third time, it was an autobiographical
talk, "Rambling Recollections of a Rambling Bookseller."
All of which they were very nice about, seemed to not
sleep through.

GARDNER: It follows that they didn't have the same
policy as the Zamorano.

ZEITLIN: No, they apparently never did. And in San
Francisco, that could hardly have been possible because
among the great leaders and patrons in all the arts
were the Jews. They've always had a patrician group up
there; people like Albert Bender, Morgan Gunst, Ted
Lilienthal, Albert Sperisen, and Jim Hart have been
leaders, have been outstanding men in the world of book
collecting, and in support of all cultural activities.
In fact, I can remember that Mayor Robinson of San
Francisco said that without the philanthropy of the
Jews there would be no opera, no philharmonic orchestra,
no museum, and practically no arts in San Francisco.
But, of course, I think that's true of a great many
communities; the Jews seem to support these things

265

disproportionately to their numbers, partly because

they represent a cultural tradition and partly because

it is a means for achieving distinction while bypassing

the usual channels of social advancement.

GARDNER: There were no restrictions, then, on booksellers

either?

ZEITLIN: No, in San Francisco, so far as I know, there

were never any restrictions, because men like David

Magee and John Newbegin and John Howell were always

leaders in the development of these clubs. Jim Blake

was a bookseller. One of the three or four founders of

the Book Club of California had worked as a clerk at

Newbegin' s, to begin with, and later became the western

American representative for Harper and Brothers and was

always looked upon as the dean of the book travelers on

the Pacific Coast during his lifetime, greatly respected.

GARDNER: And what about your association with the Grolier

Club?

ZEITLIN: Well, my association with the Grolier Club

doesn't go back very far. I can't remember now how long

I've been a member, but I suppose it would be twelve or

fifteen years. I was put up for membership by Bob Honeyman

and Bern Dibner, as well as I can remember, and have

enjoyed it very much: primarily because the clubhouse

provides a meeting place for bookish people and it also

266

provides a place where I can meet people from out of
town in New York sometimes. The dinners have always
been outstanding, and the trips have been one of the
great pleasures of Josephine and me. They have always
been real red-carpet, red-letter experiences, and the
members who have had the privilege of participating, I'm
sure, remember these trips as great events in their
lives .

GARDNER: What sort of trips?

ZEITLIN: Well, these are trips which are undertaken
once every three years or so to various parts of the
world.

267

TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO

OCTOBER 4, 19 77 and
NOVEMBER 30, 19 77

GARDNER: We were talking about the membership trips
of the Grolier Club.

ZEITLIN: Well, the trips of the Grolier Club are usually
arranged to cover one or maybe two or three countries.
They are about three years apart, usually. Arrangements
are made in advance by a tour party which makes a dry run
by visiting the countries that we proposed to go to and
setting up programs and itineraries with the local book
clubs and other organizations. Very often the visits of
the Grolier Club enjoy the benefits of being sponsored
by governmental agencies. The two which we have gone on
were, number one, the trip to Denmark, Sweden, Holland,
and Belgium; that was the first one. On those trips we
stayed at the best hotels. All we did was pack our
baggage and leave it at our door, and when we arrived at
the next hotel, we were given our key, and we went direct
to the hotel room. Passports were all taken care of en
bloc; transportation was by the most comfortable buses
or trains or planes, sometimes special trains. We were
received at palaces and castles and the leading libraries
and museums of the country, with special showings usually
with banquets and entertainment, and fed to the point

268

where we were bulging.

Each morning you would start off in a bus and travel
a considerable distance to your first location, where you
would be met with champagne. Then at noon, you would
arrive at another museum or library or palace or private
collector's home and sit down to a magnificent, lavish
dinner. Some of the dinners were given by the Bank of
Paris; in the Low Country, in Antwerp, the bank occupied
what had once been the palace of one of the Hanseatic
merchants. There was a waiter in back of every other
seated banqueteer, seven wines and liquors, the most
unbelievably lavish food, and all of the things that went
with it. But the main thing is that we were given oppor-
tunities to go into the stacks of libraries; the cases
were opened up, and we were allowed to handle magnificent
manuscripts and original documents and great books. And
also, everywhere we went, they had prepared specially-
printed gift books which represented the best quality of
printing of the country and, very often, some of the best
facsimiles of some of the best examples of the rarities
of the various libraries we visited. It was more like a
royal procession than an excursion, and you always cane
back exhausted, surfeited with good books, wonderful
experiences, and an abundance of food and drink and good
company. Nothing that I can imagine could compare with

269

these trips. We did not go on the Italian one, which
was evidently the greatest that was ever put on. The
high spot was the banquet in Rome at the Castel
Sant'Angelo with a torch procession.
GARDNER: Oh, my Lord!

ZEITLIN: But I did go on one tour to Vienna with the
Bibliophiles, where we were banqueted at the Schwarzen-
berg Palace, ballroom music by the best Viennese
musicians, and then finally the ballet of the opera
danced for us on the lawn, accompanied by the Viennese
Philharmonic Orchestra, and a grand finale of fireworks.
It would be impossible for a lone individual [not] to
enjoy this kind of a trip, and it was only because of
the imaginativeness and knowledge of the people who
arranged the trips--people like Mary Hyde and Gordon
Ray and a number of the others — that we were able to
have access to so many great collections and be enter-
tained as we were.

GARDNER: Are there many local members of Grolier?
ZEITLIN: No, not many local members. I think Elmer
Belt, Marcus Crahan . . . Larry Powell was a member,
I think. Homer Grotty has always been a member, and
Bob Vosper is a member, but he has never gone on one of
these tours. Neither has Larry Powell. Elmer and Ruth Belt
have gone on several of them; we've always enjoyed their

270

company. Warren Howell [of] San Francisco has gone, and

I can't remember who else from California.

GARDNER: Well, that's okay. I just wanted to get an

idea of what sort of people. Generally you seem to be

the only Southern California bookseller.

ZEITLIN: Yes, I have for a long time been the only

Southern California bookseller.

GARDNER: What qualified one for membership?

ZEITLIN: Well, you're supposed to be an outstanding

bookman; you're supposed to have made some contribution

to the world of books, either in terms of publishing or

writing or somehow advancing bookish activities and

bookish interests.

GARDNER: So it's really the most difficult of the clubs.

ZEITLIN: Well, it has been, although there's some peculiar

people who've gotten in from time to time. I've never

heard of a member being dropped, but I suspect that on

some occasions, not all members receive the programs of

forthcoming events.

GARDNER: Well put. [laughter]

ZEITLIN: I think this is enough for this evening, and I

hope it's been satisfactory.

GARDNER: It has.

271

NOVEMBER 30, 1977

GARDNER: Well, as we've just discussed briefly today,
I guess we'll talk about some of the many, many collectors
who've availed themselves of your services over the
years. And since you mentioned him first, and he would
be one of the ones that I would think of first, Frank
Hogan might be a good person to start with. He was sort
of tangential to your circle, wasn't he?
ZEITLIN: No, not really. Frank Hogan was the greatest
trial lawyer of his day. He had his offices in Washington
and was a little Irishman, not much over five feet tall,
immaculately dressed always, great style about him. Like
a number of other men who had risen to great success, he
started as a male secretary. There are a number of cases
I know of men who started as male typists and secretaries
and developed great careers, and I think part of that was
due to the training of keeping good notes and precision
which being a secretary required, and also the intimate
association that they had with some very capable executives
and men of consequence. Frank Hogan' s first job as a
secretary was to the president of some railroad. There
have always been a few men in executive positions who have
preferred to have male secretaries; Kenneth Hill, for
instance, is one of those men, but there have been a
number of others. However, Frank Hogan was a very poor

272

Irish boy who put himself first through secretarial
school and then through law school, became a law clerk
in a good office, and ultimately rose to be the most
in demand of all trial lawyers. He used to say that
the best client is a scared millionaire, [laughter]
and he loved to say that he'd earned as much as a million
dollars in handling a single case. He came into public
attention as a result of being the lav/yer defending
E.L. Doheny in the case connected with Teapot Dome.
This was a case in which Secretary of the Interior [Albert
B.] Fall was convicted for taking a bribe from E.L.
Doheny, and Frank Hogan was so clever a lawyer that he
got E.L. Doheny off with an acquittal.
GARDNER: How did you meet Hogan?

ZEITLIN: Mrs. Doheny had become interested in collecting
first editions--I don't know how or why — but the first
thing she started collecting was the Merle Johnson list
of American high spots. I had sold her a few things
along that line, but not very much. I think it must
have been in 1937 that Frank Hogan first came in to call
on me, and he was such a genial man and he had such a
genuine enthusiasm for literature that I was charmed by
him. And he must have liked me and thought well of me;
he invited me to come up and have lunch with him at the
California Club, and it became a regular custom, whenever

273

he was here in California on business having to do with
Doheny and other matters, while he was staying at the
California Club, that we would have lunch every Saturday.
He liked that not only because I came to lunch but I also
brought Karl Zamboni, who was working for me then, and
Karl Zamboni' s very pretty wife, [laughter] which was a
very important factor in itself. Cathy Zamboni was one
of the most beautiful young women that ever lived. She
looked like a Tahitian and was very charming and ingra-
tiating. And he would also have Lucille Miller, who was
Mrs. Doheny' s librarian, and a woman whose first name
was Jean, who worked in the office of the law firm that
represented the Dohenys here in Los Angeles. By a curious
coincidence, this Jean had also been a member of the jury
that had acquitted E.L. Doheny; I just can't say what the
connection was, [laughter] but she had a job for the rest
of her life.

We would start off with silver fizzes for lunch, and
after having imbibed a couple of those, we would proceed
to have a very luxurious lunch, well laced with wine, in
a private dining room. At the end of the lunch, Mr. Hogan
would say, "What did you bring in your bag this week,
Jake?" Well, I had done, I think, a good job of convincing
Mr. Hogan that he could become a distinguished collector —
as he did--if he insisted on two things: one, that the

274

books he bought be important books; and the second, that
they be in the finest possible condition--original boards,
uncut if possible. I got for him the Grolier Club list
of [One] Hundred Books Famous in English Literature,
which became a sort of a guide to him. He also had A.
Edward Newton's list, and he had already bought a few
books: they were all cripples--the kind of books that a
man commencing to collect would buy, like an imperfect
fourth folio of Shakespeare. He was enchanted by the
idea that you could own a Shakespeare at all, and the
first time he saw a fourth folio of Shakespeare, he thought
this was like realizing an impossible dream, so he impetu-
ously bought it. I got for him a number of books in fine
condition. Naturally, I didn't have a very good stock of
my own, and I depended on books coming from other people.
One of my best sources was Byrne Hackett of the Brick Row
Book Shop, who, I think, thought that he was really getting
away with murder because he sold me a copy of Boswell's
Life of Johnson--the original boards, uncut — for something
like $1,500, and I turned around and sold it to Mr. Hogan
for $1,800. I wonder what a copy of that, as fine as that,
would bring today.

Hogan set out to buy the hundred books famous in
English literature, and he was, as I say, a very impetuous
man. He was an enthusiastic man, and he went direct to

275

whoever was the best in the field he was interested
in. He became a personal friend of A. Edward Newton.
They exchanged visits, and he became a regular visitor
at Newton's house; I think it was along the railroad
outside of Philadelphia. I sold him a substantial
number of books, and it was a great pleasure because
he would open them up and he would read passages that
appealed to him. He had a fantastic memory; he could
remember, verbatim, almost everything he'd ever read.
On one occasion I brought him a copy of Logan Pearsall
Smith's book on William Shakespeare. He read it through
and, ever afterward, was able to quote that book in full
length if necessary. He was the kind of collector that
you enjoyed because you not only got well paid and
promptly, but you also had the pleasure of sharing the
enjoyment of the books with the customer.

I remember I introduced him to the poetry of
Charlotte Mew, a rather obscure English woman poet who
wrote some very poignant, very touching lyrics--not a
major poet by any means but, on the other hand, a poet
of real quality. She published only two books and one
pamphlet, as well as I remember, and I got both of those
for him, and then he said, "Well, we're going to have to
find some manuscripts." And through the Poetry Bookshop
in London, I was able to get some manuscripts of Charlotte

276

Mew, and I remember how we would sip our silver fizzes
and read aloud from Charlotte Mew's manuscripts and
weep as we read these lines. [laughter] Every Saturday
that he was in town was the occasion for one of these
meetings, and considering that I was a little bookseller
who could hardly pay his rent, he was really God's gift.
Sometimes I would come away with a check for $2,000 and
sometimes a check for $3,500, and on one occasion, I
think he paid me as much as $7,200 for one Saturday after-
noon's sales to him.

I remember being with him on one occasion just after
I had read that Dr. Rosenbach had bought the Lord Roseberry
First Folio of Shakespeare in London at Sotheby's for
$85,000. I asked if that had been bought for him, and he
said, "Yes, and I'm just about to consult the best bank-
ruptcy lawyers." He had gone to see Dr. Rosenbach, and
Dr. Rosenbach maintained an apartment and a chef in con-
nection with the house in which he kept his books in
Philadelphia and the beautiful apartment which he had in
New York. So if you were a really important customer, you
were housed in his apartment. You were dined and wined by
his private chef, and by the time dinner was over, and he
was ready to show you his books, you were totally without
any capacity for resistance. The doctor was a charming
man and knew how to say the right things about the books

277

he had; and he did have, undoubtedly, the greatest
collection of important rarities in English literature
of anybody in the world in his day.

GARDNER: I'd better break in here to say that your
wife is just signaling that our own dinner is ready.
ZEITLIN: Oh, right. [tape recorder turned off] Frank
Hogan had already started to buy the books on the Grolier
Club list of a hundred great books of English literature.
There were two volumes issued. One contained bibliographic
description; the other were issues, essays, and I think
George Edward Woodberry was the author of the essays.
I had introduced him to this idea and brought him the
Grolier Club books, and I supplied him with a few things--
I think, [Thomas] Gray's "Ode," and perhaps [Oliver
Goldsmith's] Vicar of Wakefield, and Jane Austen's Pride
and Prejudice, which he considered her best novel.

The copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice which
I supplied him with v;as three volumes in the original
boards, uncut, some repairs to the binding, and restoration
of the labels, and yet it seemed to be about the best copy
you could possibly hope to find of a book so fragile in
its original format. Several years afterward, Lionel or
Phillip Robinson of the Robinson Brothers in London came
around and said to Mr. Hogan, "You know, that copy of
Pride and Prejudice was made up, and it was made up in

278

Newcastle-on-Tyne by a man named Arthur Rogers, who took
three different copies and put them together and then
had them bound by a very skillful binder in such a way
as to look like the original boards uncut.

Well, Frank Hogan didn't say anything. They knew
that he'd bought them from me; and the Robinson brothers,
I'm sorry to say, liked to discover good collectors and
then spoil their association with whoever was their
bookseller, and then they would move in. They liked
nothing but big collectors whom they could take over,
and they were very good at it, I must say. They once did
it to the bookseller who used to come to them and buy
books to sell to Dr. [Martin] Bodmer in Switzerland. He
was an old gentleman who'd been a bookseller in Germany
and had settled in London. And when they discovered what
fine books this man was buying from them and taking to
Bodmer, they wheedled out of him who was buying these
books. And they went direct to Bodmer and said, "Why do
you buy these books from this old man when we're the ones
that have these books, and he gets them all from us?"

However, they later came out here and told me, "You
know, that Pride and Prejudice you sold Hogan was a made-up
copy." I was very much embarrassed and very distressed;
he'd paid me something like $2,500 for it, which was a
lot of money, even then, for a Jane Austen. So I called

279

up Hogan and said, "Mr. Hogan, I wouldn't want you to
keep that book. I can't afford to give you back the
money--I haven't got it--but I will give you credit on
anything else you want to buy. You can turn in the book,
and when there are other books you want, you can just
take the other books in exchange." "No," he said, "I'm
not going to do that. I'm going to keep that book
because I don't like tattletales. " He didn't really
care for the fact that the Robinsons had come to him with
this story, because he understood what their motive was.

Frank Hogan, as I say, was invited to visit Dr.
Rosenbach. He called Rosenbach from Washington, and by
that time, Rosenbach knew more or less who Frank Hogan
was, and [Rosenbach] said, "Well, come stay at our
house." So Dr. Rosenbach put him up in grand style,
wined and dined him, offered him his best cigars after-
wards. And after regaling him with stories of the great
collections he'd formed, the great rare books he'd bought,
and the high prices he'd paid, he proceeded to show Mr.
Hogan very fine copies of most of the other books in the
[Grolier Club] list of one hundred great books in litera-
ture--the ones that were hardest to get, such as the
[William] Caxton Chaucer. Hogan was so enchanted that
that night he proceeded to indebt himself to Rosenbach
for about a million dollars.

280

GARDNER: That's enchantment! [laughter]
ZEITLIN: Yes. Here he saw, all in one place, all these
great books in English literature, famous copies with
wonderful provenance, and he had the feeling that he
must get them all now. So the next time Mr. Hogan came
out to California and I brought him a satchel of books,
we had lunch, and then I started to unpack the satchel,
and he said, "Jake, it's no use. I owe Dr. Rosenbach
more money than I'll be able to pay him in my lifetime.
I'm indebted for the next ten years, and I just can't
buy anything else." Well, I must say that I wasn't very
happy that Dr. Rosenbach had capitalized on my having
educated a collector. Later on Dr. Rosenbach came out
to California; I think it was '38. He came to my shop,
was very friendly, not condescending, made me feel that
he was honored to be able to call on me, invited me to
dinner. He was staying at the Town House. Frank Hogan
was also in town, and we arranged a dinner for Rosenbach
to which Frank Capra, Frank Hogan, Lucille Miller, Frank
Capra ' s wife, and Jo Swerling were invited, along with
Jules Furthman, who was in those days a considerable
collector of rare books. The Wine and Food Society had
a grand banquet one night later. I took Dr. Rosenbach
as my guest; they made a great fuss over him, and I was
given the privilege of introducing him at the dinner.

281

Mrs. Doheny gave a tea for him to which I was invited
(it was about ten or twelve years after I'd worked for
Mrs. Doheny as a gardener) . I must say he was very gracious
about asking people to invite me. Jean Hersholt gave a
grand evening lawn party for Dr. Rosenbach. (Dr. Rosenbach,
I'm sorry to say, was disgracefully inebriated before the
evening was over.) At the end of his visit here, he went
back to Philadelphia, and he hadn't sold one dollar's worth
of books. With all the grand books he brought out--which
included the original manuscript of James Joyce's Ulysses,
the original manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage, the
original manuscript of Oscar Wilde's Salome, a choice selec-
tion of important English books, like [Robert] Herrick's
poems (first edition) , and the first, second, third, and
fourth folios of Shakespeare, and a number of other very
outstanding items — he hadn't sold anything. There just were
no buyers; even Mrs. Doheny didn't buy anything from him.
And to add insult to injury, his brother Philip — who was
always sort of downgrading Abe, his brother, because he
didn't think Abe was a good businessman or knew how to make
money (Philip was a man who dealt in antiques and old silver,
and so on, the same business) --came out here. He was a
rather vulgar man; he knew how to live in style, but he
certainly was not an aesthete or a cultivated man. He always
brought out some blond cutie with him. He came out and

282

called on Mrs. Doheny and sold her a tapestry--the kind
that most people wouldn't give house room to and which
were being sold at auction houses at knocked-down prices.
He sold her the tapestry for, I was told, $100,000. Then
he went back and gloated over poor Dr. Rosenbach and said,
"You're no good as a salesman."
GARDNER: Why was the market so difficult?
ZEITLIN: Well, a lot of people's stocks had sold so low;
either they lost all their investments by buying on margin,
or what they had left couldn't be sold for enough to buy a
piece of cheese with. And the doctor was having a very
hard time. He told me that he had to sell something; he
owed the banks $300,000. And I said, "Don't worry, if you
owe them that much money, they'll never close you down."
And that was true. Well, he lived it out, although he
himself never really hit his stride again as a great book-
seller. People would come because going to Rosenbach 's
was like going to Tiffany's.
GARDNER: What happened to Hogan?

ZEITLIN: Hogan formed a beautiful collection. He came
out here once and was given a special dinner by the
Zamorano Club. He invited me to be his guest at that
dinner. He brought along some of his choicest books to
display. I know he had a copy of "Endymion"; he had a
book which contained Milton's "Lycidas"; he had Shelley's

283

Revolt of Islam and Keats 's poems (I've forgotten which
one just now) --all special copies, either presentation
or association or annotated. He brought along a little
satchel of his choicest books to show the Zamorano Club
and asked me to be the one to show them to the members
of the club — and that was about twenty years before they
decided to admit booksellers like me to the membership.
I must say that when they invited Dr. Rosenbach to the
Zamorano Club, he also was kind enough to ask me to come
along as his guest.

Frank Hogan defended Andrew Mellon, who had been
accused of some kind of improper action at the time that
he was secretary of the treasury under Herbert Hoover, I
suppose, or maybe under Coolidge or Harding. In any
event, he made a deal directly with Franklin Roosevelt
that if the government would not prosecute, Andrew Mellon
would give the nation the National Gallery of Art and his
entire personal collection of art. I think, a very good
trade-off. [laughter] It saved Andy Mellon from disgrace
and saved the government from very expensive and difficult
legal proceedings, and got us the National Gallery of Art,
of which Paul Mellon has remained a member of the board
of trustees, and to which the Mellon family has made a
great many very generous contributions.

Frank Hogan finally fell ill. I don't know exactly

284

what it was; it was something that was a degenerative
condition having to do with the circulation, I think —
probably arteriosclerosis. He settled in Palm Springs
for the last year or so of his life, and he died out
there. He died at a rather early age--I don't think he
could have been more than sixty when he died--and he
certainly left a reputation among book collectors and
booksellers like no one else in my time. He was very
enthusiastic about the books he bought. He gave dealers
pleasure when he bought books. He also was very generous:
he underwrote people like Jake Blanck. He enabled Jake
Blanck to begin the Bibliography of American Literature .
He liked booksellers, and he was willing to see that they
made a good profit and to make them his friends. When
selections from his library were sold at, I think it must
have been, the American Art Galleries (before Sotheby
Parke Bernet took over the American Art Galleries) , it
was a very bad time and a lot of his books didn't bring
as much as they should have, but some of them brought very
good prices. Today the same sort of a collection would
make a sensation on the market. I suppose in all he didn't
have a great many books in quantity, but he had a remarkable
number of choice books. There isn't anyone I know who was
more loved by the bookselling world, more respected by the
legal world. He was the president of the American Bar

285

Association for a term and, incidentally, was influential
in the passing of the child labor laws. In other ways,
he couldn't have really been called a friend of the
laboring man and the poor, but he did exert himself in
certain areas. He was a man of great tolerance, a
wonderful storyteller, and a man everyone loved. I can't
remember anybody except V'Jalter Barrett who, as an indi-
vidual, made himself as much a part of the bookselling
world and the collecting world as Frank Hogan, considering
the few years in which he was active as a book collector.
And I remember getting a letter once from A. Edward
Newton saying, "If you haven't met Frank Hogan, you should
do so. He is a delightful storyteller, a very generous
man, and he has a memory like Macaulay. " [laughter]
Later Frank Hogan wanted that letter, and I couldn't find
it. I searched and searched, and I would have given
anything to find it and give it to him. Because in the
last days, when he was quite ill, he sent someone to me
and said, "Couldn't you possibly find that letter of A.
Edward Newton's?"

286

TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 30, 1977

GARDNER: I suggested that next you talk about Elmer
Belt.

ZEITLIN: Well, I think that would be a good subject.
I'm not sure that I haven't talked about him before;
but even if I have, whatever I may have said is worth
repeating. Elmer Belt, like a number of the other
great collectors, is remembered first of all for being
a fine human being. He was, I think, one of the most
truly endowed physicians that I ever knew. He is the
kind of man who makes people feel better just by coming
into the room. He creates an air of assurance when he
talks to them and when he listens to them. He has the
faculty for making each person he talks to feel like he
is totally concentrated on what they have to say and
totally interested in what their particular problem is.
And I think that many patients feel better after their
first meeting with him, simply because they feel that
here is somebody who understands, them; and that in it-
self, of course, can be a tonic.
GARDNER: How did you first meet him?
ZEITLIN: He came into my shop with his nurse. Miss
Katherine Theil. Wherever Elmer Belt was in those
early years (my acquaintance begins in 1928) , Miss

287

Theil was there, too. She managed his office; she managed
his appointments; she managed every activity that took
place in connection with his practice and, I think, took
care of most of his social engagements as well. She
knew as much about him and his life as he did himself
(and perhaps even more) , and she was the perfect secretary-
assistant. She was totally dedicated to him. Her day
began much before he arose, even though he arose very
early, and ended long after he left the office.

He and Miss Theil came into my shop, and he immediately
cast that peculiar Elmer spell on me, which has lasted
until now. He asked if I had any old medical books, and
it happened that I had just one medical book. It was a
very thick, small folio having to do with pathology. The
vellum binding was very wrinkled; and it was a book, I
would say, about ten inches high by about eight inches
wide, figuring from the back to the fore edge. I remember
the title. The title was Bonetus's Sepulcretum, and it
consisted of an immense number of post mortems. So in
1928, I think it must have been September or October of
that year, I sold my first medical book and the first book
that I sold Elmer Belt — Bonetus's Sepulcretum.

The book wasn't mine; it had been turned over to me
to sell by a Dr. Charles Lincoln Edwards, a wonderful old
gentleman who at that time was connected with the public

288

school system. He had maintained a sort of a museum of
natural history to which classes in the public schools
came. He gave lectures on birds and natural history
of all sorts. He and his wife were quite elderly even
at that time. He'd had a considerable career. His first
position that I know of was at the University of Texas,
where he was in the zoology department. Either while
there or shortly before, he compiled what I think is the
first book on folk songs that is separately and strictly
devoted to folk songs. It was published by the American
Folklore Society in 1895, and it is called Bahama Songs
and Stories . I am very proud to possess a copy which he
inscribed to me.

Dr. Edwards came under fire while he was at the
University of Texas because he was an advocate of the
theory of evolution according to Darwinian terms; and of
course in those days, to be a Darwinian and an evolution-
ist in Texas was to be a candidate for burning at the
stake. He was dismissed from the University of Texas
just about the time David Starr Jordan was forming a
faculty for what was to be Leland Stanford, Jr. , University,
and he recruited Dr. Edwards, who went to Stanford and
remained there for a great many years, until, I think,
his retirement. Then he came down to Southern California
and, after his retirement, commenced his new career of

289

teaching children in the public schools about natural
history. He had a number of assistants who later became
outstanding: one of them, whose name I can't remember
right now, became one of America's foremost herpetolo-
gists. He had over the years acquired a number of books;
some of them, I think, just because he knew they were
good books and he saw them going for very little. This
Bonetus's Sepulcretum he must have acquired for that
reason, because I don't think he or many other people--
outside of the men who were interested in discovering
the causes of death by dissecting the cadavers of the
deceased — would have been interested in this book. He
brought me a number of other great books — [John] Gould's
One Hundred Birds of the Himalayas ; a number of other of
Gould's important books, which I sold for very, very
little money. Now, some of those books are bringing
$25,000; we probably sold them for $700 or $800 or
$1,000. I'm very sad because Dr. Edwards and his wife
could well have used the money.

Dr. Belt told me something about his interests, and
he said, "In particular, if you get anything of Leonardo
da Vinci, I would like to have it." So I've forgotten,
but something came along that was related to Leonardo,
and I called his office. Miss Theil said, "He's very
busy, but why don't you come up here and wait until he's

290

through with his patients, and then he can see you and
see the book." So I came up, and I brought along a
satchel full of other books, and I discovered that Elmer
Belt not only was a very kind and considerate man but
that he had very little resistance to books. And he
bought several books from me--which fortunately enabled
me to pay the rent that month, as well as the payroll —
and also that one book having to do with Leonardo.

He said, "There's a book I want you to get for me,
and I want you to get two copies. Send off to Italy
and get me two copies of [Ettore] Verga's Bibliographia
Vinciana, " which is the bibliography of all books by or
about Leonardo da Vinci, up to somewhere like 1912, I
guess. I sent off to Italy and got the two copies of
the book, and when they came, I brought them to him.
And he said, "All right, I will keep one and you keep
one, and I want you to get me every book listed in here.
I can't afford very much money--! can probably afford
$200 a month--but buy them as you find them. If you see
something very important that's more money, speak to me
about it, and maybe I can find a way to buy it. Now,"
he said, "I'm going to leave the price up to you, so go
easy on me. Don't overcharge me. If you do, I won't
buy anything else from you." Well, that was good enough
incentive, and a caution to me. I wanted very much to

291

keep Elmer Belt happy, so I added a very minimal profit
to most of the books I sold to him. But having a customer
who'd buy as much as $200 a month steadily was a very
valuable thing to me. And also having this opportunity
to do what I think every good bookseller would like to
do--that is, build a collection from its very foundation —
was a great inspiration to me and a great satisfaction.

So from that time on, through the years, I've con-
tinued to send Elmer Belt books, sometimes no more than
one a month and sometimes two or three a week. If it was
in the Verga bibliography and he didn't have it, he wanted
it. And with that as an incentive, of course, I was able
to buy a lot of books which I wouldn't have bought other-
wise and sell them to him at a short profit, because I was
sure of a sale when I bought them. And having a sure sale
made it easy for me to put on a small profit, whereas if I
had to buy them for stock and keep them at the risk of
waiting a long time before selling them, I would have had
to put a larger profit on them. So it worked out very
well for me. And as time went on, the collection grew.

Then along came a little woman by the name of Kate
Steinitz. I think she arrived here about 1942. Kate was
a rather overwhelming little German woman who had a way
of commanding attention. At first when I met her, he
[Dr. Belt] invited me to come over to his office, and he

292

said, "I want you to meet someone." Here was this little
woman who had come into his office to have an examination
because she had kidney stones. Her husband had been a
doctor in Germany; they'd come to New York as refugees.
Her husband couldn't get a license to practice. He com-
mitted suicide, and Kate was left with three daughters to
support and very little money. She managed somehow — I
don't know how, but she manged to carry on. She came out
here, and somebody told her to go see Dr. Elmer Belt about
her kidney stones, and she went to see him. And Elmer
Belt said, "Well, we'd better make an appointment for you
to go to the hospital tomorrow." And she said, "Oh, no,
I'm not going to go to the hospital. My husband always
told me that doctors want to cut easy and that people die
more from being cut than from anything else, and I'm not
going to go." "V'Jell," he said, "it's your choice."

But then she saw all these books in his office, and
she started to talk to him, and it turned out that she
was very knowledgeable in the history of art. She had
this quick intelligence and quick perception of people
and what they were interested in. So Elmer Belt thought,
"Well, this is an interesting person," and he invited me
to meet her, and we got acquainted. And I must say, I was
put off at first. I really thought, "My God, she's just
too much." I don't know how to cope with a woman who

293

overwhelms you with conversation, and in sort of a
compelling way.

But she didn't let him operate. She stayed around
a while, and then she went back to New York. And she
wrote me a letter, and she said, "I understand you're
supplying Dr. Elmer Belt with books connected with
Leonardo." She said, "I have to stay here in order to
get my citizenship papers before I come back to the
Coast — I'm going to go back out there — and I'd like to
scout for you and pick up books for you." Within a very
short time, she reported some outstanding things, includ-
ing one of the best books that's in Elmer's collection,
a copy of [Luca] Pacioli's Divina Proportione . It was
published, I think, in 1508 or 1509, and it is the only
book of his time for which Leonardo actually supplied
the drawings. It is a very rare book indeed and today
up in around the $10,000 class. I think she got it for
him for something like $450 from an old sea captain.
It was a curious story which I won't go into. And then
she haunted Weyhe ' s and the other art-book stores and
found other Leonardo books, quite obscure ones which I
certainly would have missed and Elmer wouldn't have had
the time to hunt up. She would send them out, and I
would tell Elmer where I got them; that she had found
them for me. She would write him also [in that] peculiar

294

scratchy hand of hers with corrections every other word.

When she came back, the story I have is that she
went to see Dr. Belt; and Belt said, "See here, Mrs.
Steinitz, I think you should have those kidney stones
removed, and I'll tell you what I'll do: if you will
let me remove your kidney stones, I will let you come
to work for me as my librarian." Well, that was a temp-
tation beyond Kate's power to resist, and very shortly
thereafter, she was operated on, her kidney stones
removed, and she started in to be Elmer Belt's librarian.

She was a most peculiar librarian: she didn't know
anything about librarianship in the ordinary sense, so
she had to learn all about the systems of classification
and descriptive bibliography. But she learned very
rapidly, and she knew how to consult the right people,
how to consult the right reference books, and nothing
ever put her down. She had this belief, which I think
is very important, that if somebody else could learn it,
she could too. She learned Italian, started to translate
from the Italian, took lessons in conversational Italian.
She, of course, knew German and French already. And she
had this very quick perception. She had this curiosity
about everything on earth and, I must add, the most
broadly tolerant understanding of anybody I ever knew.
There were many things in art and human behavior which

295

I found rather hard to tolerate, but I never found her
unable to or unwilling to tolerate. She always knew
there was something justifiable, something worth learning
about every form of expression in art and every form of
human behavior.

GARDNER: How did Elmer Belt get interested in Vinciana?
ZEITLIN: Well, Elmer Belt, when he was a medical student,
of course, had to learn to do anatomical drawings, and in
the course of learning to do anatomical drawings, he was
shown some models in Folio A or Folio B of Leonardo, the
edition published in Paris. And I think it was George
Corner--there were two men who both, I think, were very
influential in introducing Elmer to Leonardo. One was
Dr. George Corner, who's still alive. He came to
Berkeley as a professor as a very young man, and the
students couldn't believe that this man who looked younger
than most of the students could be a professor of physi-
ology or anatomy. His senior there, the man under whose
sponsorship he came, was Dr. Herbert Evans, who was a
very colorful man himself, about whom I shall talk later.
Herbert Evans not only was a great lecturer and a great
physiologist, but he also had great facility at teaching
anatomy by drawing on the blackboard as he lectured. He
also had the trick of drawing with both hands.

I think he and George Corner together could have

296

shown some of the anatomical drawings of Leonardo to
Elmer; and Elmer, of course, quickly recognized the
quality of these drawings, in terms of their anatomical
correctness and the extent that Leonardo was able to
describe what he knew. The thing about anatomy through
the ages is that anatomists never drew more than they
were capable of seeing through their knowledge of
anatomy. And as their knowledge increased, their
capacity for drawing increased--unlike the artists, who
could draw the human figure with a great deal more
accuracy and putting in more of the details of what was
there than the anatomists. The anatomists drew diagram-
matically, I think one should say, and they drew from
the standpoint of knowledge of the function of what
they were drawing, the same way that primitive man never
knew what he was looking at and could never draw the
human body as he saw it, even though he'd cut it to
pieces many times.

So Elmer started off, when he was able to (I think,
at that time, he was a very poor medical student, and
he couldn't afford it) by getting himself the Folio A
and B of Leonardo, which had to do with anatomical draw-
ings. It became his ambition to form a library of
everything by and about Leonardo, so that anyone else
coming after him could go to one place and find every-

297

thing that he might want to refer to if he wanted to
learn more about Leonardo. In later years, when he put
his collection at UCLA, his dream was realized, most
significantly when Ladislao Reti, who was chosen to
edit the newly discovered Codex Madrid, decided to come
to UCLA and stay close to the campus and use the Elmer
Belt Library [of Vinciana] , because he felt that no
place else in the world was there everything that he
would need in order to translate and comment on the
Madrid Codices. Not only did Reti use the library in
that way, but so did a great many other scholars.

Kate Steinitz played a very important role in
making the library known. She would issue catalogs
of acquisitions; she wrote essays; she communicated
with scholars; she answered queries. Elmer did his
share by studying the things which came. He had a
quick eye: as the books arrived, he would look into
them. Kate would point out some things; a great many
things he was quick to see, so that he did some very
good lectures on Leonardo the anatomist. And between
Kate and Elmer, they made what could have been just an
accumulation of books into a great tool for scholarship
and an inspiration. It was Kate who perceived the
capabilities of Carlo Pedretti when he was a young man
in Bologna and had practically no recognition. VJhen

298

he wrote her and she saw what great capacities he had,
she encouraged him to go on. She arranged for Dr. Belt
and Bern Dibner to put up the bond to sponsor him for
his immigration to the United States. She attracted
a great many other scholars to the Belt Library. When
she traveled in Europe, she called on the libraries and
musemns--the curators and directors--and the bookshops;
she had every bookseller in Europe and the United States
writing to her whenever they got anything of a Leonardesque
nature, and she got her pick of a lot of very good books
that way.

She went to the town of Vinci. It was partly through
her contacts — more because of Elmer's own visit there —
that the town of Vinci, which was Leonardo's birthplace,
acquired a library of Leonardo books which Elmer gave
them. They had nothing in the way of books or any col-
lection at all of Leonardo material in Vinci until Elmer
Belt started sending them material and gave them the
nucleus for a library. Following that, the city of Vinci
founded an annual Leonardo lectureship, and both Elmer
Belt and Kate Steinitz, as well as Ladislao Reti and
Carlo Pedretti, were in various years the Vinci lecturer.
And when Kate Steinitz came there to lecture, the Italian
Air Force staged a fly-by over Vinci.

Elmer Belt is an unusual individual. He's touched a

299

great many people. He has encouraged a great many people;
he's been part of the lives of a great many people; and
I don't know anyone, no matter how famous they are, towards
whom so many people have a great feeling of love and
devotion. When the national library at Madrid agreed to
lend a group of the drawings of the Codex Madrid to the
Smithsonian Institute for an exhibit, Elmer Belt and I
were invited to come be present at the opening and to
attend a dinner on the occasion. Silvio Bedini, who was
in charge of this, had first invited me and then sort of
tried to disinvite me, for reasons that I have to reserve
until another time. When he invited Elmer Belt, Elmer
said, "I'll only come on one condition, and that is that
Jake come with me. Otherwise, I won't go." So I went
with him, and we stayed overnight at the Cosmos Club,
attended the lecture and the opening festivities. The
next morning, we took the plane back to Los Angeles. On
the way back, he fell asleep, and the stewardess looked
at him, came over and arranged a blanket over him, and
she said, "Who is that wonderful man?" He hadn't opened
his mouth, he was asleep, but she said, "He must be
somebody special."
GARDNER: Wonderful. [laughter]

ZEITLIN: And I said, "Yes, he is." And later on, when
I told the story somewhere, I said, "That's our Elmer.

300

He can charm them even when he's asleep." [laughter]
GARDNER: What about the giving of the library to UCLA?
What were the circumstances of that?
ZEITLIN: That became rather complicated. I'm not
acquainted with all the details, although I was involved.
He had expressed his intention of giving it to UCLA,
and at that time, Larry Powell was the librarian. Bob
Vosper was the assistant librarian, and Franklin Murphy
was the chancellor of the university. And Elmer Belt
had told them that he wanted to give the collection. I
then was engaged to make an appraisal of it, and then
he didn't hear anything from them for quite a while.
He rather felt that it was up to them to make the next
move, but they somehow or another let it drift, until
one day I heard that he was being courted by the
Huntington Library. Well, it happened that the evening
after I heard this, I had been invited to a little
gathering at Chancellor Murphy's house, and at the dinner
table I said, "Look, I have something important; I want
everybody here to listen to me. UCLA's going to lose a
great collection unless they do something very quickly —
Elmer Belt's Leonardo collection. He thinks you don't
appreciate it." (This was another case of their not
moving in like they should have, except this turned out
successfully.) I said, "Now, don't lose any time. Get

301

ahold of Elmer as quickly as you can. Tell him that
you will provide space for it, offer him a plan of what
you will do, and don't let this library get away from
you. "

So they very quickly did get over to see Elmer, and
Franklin Murphy deserves a great deal of the credit —
also Larry Powell, but Franklin Murphy had a way of
showing his interest and also making a proposal that
was definite and had something distinctive about it.
He proposed to Elmer Belt that they would set up the
Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana in separate quarters,
and that they would conserve it properly and not dis-
tribute it in the stacks in the university or let it
get dispersed or lose its identity. And this, of course,
is what was needed in the case of a collection like this,
and I think it was very much to the benefit of the uni-
versity as well as to the satisfaction of Elmer Belt
and very much to the credit of Franklin Murphy, that the
library did come to UCLA.

Now, at first it was housed in a separate couple of
rooms, but at least it was kept segregated, and Kate was
made sort of an honorary curator. Elmer paid her salary,
but Kate was there in charge. I'm sure that the people
at the university did not appreciate Kate. They saw her
as this little, gnarled, rather demanding old woman [who was]

302

temperamental and hard to understand [and] a little bit
absentminded: she wouldn't always lock the room when
she left it, and so on, which was terrible for them.
And I think they far underestimated what a great
person they had there and what an important asset to
the university she was, in terms of bringing a great
many important scholars there to visit, see the place,
and meet the other faculty members. They failed to
accommodate her as much as they should have. Even if
she was troublesome, I don't think she was that trouble-
some. I know some other people who made that mistake,
too. One art dealer here in town who I tried to get
interested in selling something for Kate sneered at it
and said, "That gabby little old woman. I don't want
to be bothered with her." It turned out that this was
one of the very important works of Kurt Schwitters, who
was the hottest thing in the European market. And she
had more of them, which this man might have gotten hold
of if he'd just had the perception to see what kind of
a person Kate was.

Well, Elmer is thoughtful in so many ways, it's hard
to conceive of how he has time to be as considerate of
everyone as he is. You never fail to get a note of
appreciation from him, usually written in his own hand,
for the slightest thing that you might remember to do for

303

him. And it's been my pleasure to be with him on two
journeys to Europe. It has been my pleasure to be present
at a number of his birthday parties, to enjoy his confi-
dence, and to share lots of things with him. I can't think
of a more wonderful man. Ruth Belt and he both came to my
seventy-fifth birthday party, which was a great compliment.
Elmer is now about eighty-six or eighty-seven years old
and isn't too spry, at least certainly not in the evenings.
And Ruth Belt doesn't go out at all--she is totally house-
bound--but she made the effort and came to my birthday
party and sat next to me, and I couldn't have had a greater
compliment.

GARDNER: Would he be about your longest-running continuous
collector?

ZEITLIN: I suppose so, now. I can't remember anyone else
who is still alive that bought books from me earlier. I
have had people turn up lately whom I knew as early as 1925,
when I first went to work at Bullock's, but I can't remember
that any one of them--well, yes, there are two people whom
I remember who came first as customers. One of them was a
lovely woman who was a very young, wonderful creature. Mina
Cooper she was then; she's married to Herb [H. Arthur] Klein
now, and lives in Malibu, and she's still a very dear friend,
And the other was a young woman intern by the name of Esther
Somerfeld, who was interning at County Medical. She came in

304

to buy a book for a wedding present for a couple of
friends, and then she came to buy a present for another
young intern there by the name of Eugene Ziskind, and
later they were married. A few weeks ago, we went to
their fiftieth wedding anniversary party, and she
introduced me to the woman who bought a copy of Shelley's
poems from me, which was given to the husband on the
occasion of their wedding.

GARDNER: That's marvelous. [laughter] You have a group
of golden-anniversary people all over the city.
ZEITLIN: Yes, right now I've been attending more than
one fiftieth wedding anniversary, and so I'm glad of that.
GARDNER: To move to your list--I guess, after Frank
Hogan, among the older collectors or the longer-ago
collectors, you have Albert Bender.

ZEITLIN: Yes. I want to say one more thing about Elmer
Belt. Elmer Belt's not just a collector in one field.
Some people may think that Leonardo da Vinci has been
Elmer Belt's exclusive collection. Of course, he's formed
a very great collection of rarities in medicine. He has
some important books in the history of science, such as
a fine copy in the original presentation binding of
[William] Gilbert on the magnet [De Magnete] , a very fine
copy of Tagliacozzi on plastic surgery, of course the
first and second edition of Vesalius's Anatomy [De Humani

305

Corporis Fabrica] , and a good many of the important
classics in medicine. But in addition to that, he had
a collection of Upton Sinclair which was quite extensive,
not only in English but in translations into many
languages, and that collection he gave to Occidental
College. He formed a collection of the works of S. VJeir
Mitchell; a collection of the works on nursing, including
letters and books of Florence Nightingale; a collection
of D.H. Lawrence; and a very exhaustive collection of
books on whaling--he had become interested in the anatomy
of the whale because of a peculiar anomaly having to do
with the kidneys of whales. (I suppose peculiar anomaly
is a redundancy — an anomaly is^ a peculiarity.) He has
collected a lot of fine-press books and books on art
outside of Leonardo da Vinci. He is an omnivorous reader
in a great many areas. Elmer Belt's collecting is a
reflection of the breadth of his mind and also his
infinite capacity for fine detail as it expresses itself
in surgery and in his knowledge of medicine. In some ways,
you could take his library, and it would be a portrait of
the man .

GARDNER: Have you ever dealt with him on a professional
basis?

ZEITLIN: Yes. He's operated on me.
GARDNER: That seems to be the thread that runs through

306

many of our oral histories.

ZEITLIN: Is that so? Elmer Belt? Well, he had, at
one time, the largest surgical practice of any single
man in the United States.
GARDNER: Is that so?

ZEITLIN: Yes. It's not very much now, simply because
he isn't able to keep up with it. His staff has dimin-
ished. His son has left his office; his nephew has
left his office for various reasons, and I don't think
that it was incompatibility. They had ambitions of their
own. And so, while he has a continuing practice, it's
not what it was.

GARDNER: Is he still able to. . . ?

ZEITLIN: Well, that's the point. I don't feel that
Elmer should continue to do anything but consult. He's
certainly a very competent diagnostician and consultant.

307

TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 13, 1977

GARDNER: You mentioned that you wanted to finish up
with Elmer Belt.

ZEITLIN: Yes. I think it ought to be pointed up that
Elmer Belt demonstrated something very special about himself
when he saw the possibilities of Kate Steinitz, [when]
most of us (and I'll include myself) had no idea what
her possibilities were--what capacities she had and
what potential she had when we first met her. And it's
because he had this confidence in her, because he was
willing to give her his support and to underwrite her
that she developed in her own knowledge and that she
became such an important person in the world of students
of Leonardo da Vinci, and that she contributed to the
literature, and that she corresponded with all of the
Leonardistas in the various parts of the world. She
became in her time, among the scholars who were interested
in Leonardo, something like [Father] Mersenne was in his
time among the men interested in science in all the
various parts of the world. Through corresponding with
him, they created a sort of a crossroads for the exchange
of information, and this really sparked everyone involved.
And it was because of Kate Steinitz and the central
position she held through being Elmer Belt's librarian

308

that a great many things happened in the v;orld of
Leonardo research. It was Kate Steinitz who picked
Carlo Pedretti, a young boy in Bologna; realized that
he had the possibilities of being a great Leonardo
scholar, and arranged for him to come over here. She
got Elmer Belt, Bern Dibner, and Ladislao Reti all to
put up money for a fund with which to support Pedretti
and enable him to come over, and to stay here and get
the degrees that were necessary for his progress, and do
the work that he did and is still doing. So that he
has now become one of the three or four outstanding
scholars among the Leonardistas . This, again, was a
case of Elmer perceiving that Pedretti had these possi-
bilities and being willing to help him.

I think that it was true also in my case. Certainly,
without Elmer Belt and his continued support, I might
very well have not been able to stay in business. And
the fact that I had one customer whose business might
amount to, say, no more than $4 00 a month, but it was a
regular $400 a month, really made all the difference
between success and failure. And so I think that it has
to be said above everything else that Elmer Belt deserves
very high credit for his ability to appreciate people of
talent, sometimes even people with whom he didn't agree--
like Kurt Schwitters, whom he met in Sweden when he went

309

over there--but whose qualities he appreciated and whom
he was willing to recognize and give support to. This,
I think, entitles him to very high marks as a sponsor of
culture and as a human being. It was out of my association
with Elmer Belt and Kate Steinitz that I met Bern Dibner.
As well as I can remember, this must have been about 1946,
right after World War II, that Kate Steinitz brought Bern
Dibner over to my shop on Carondelet Street. He was a
very unimpressive looking little man with a small moustache,
very brusque, and very much alert and quick to observe and
remember everything you said and any new information that
came his way. He was a Russian Jewish immigrant who came
to the United States and got a degree in electrical engi-
neering in Brooklyn. I think he got most of his schooling
at night. I think he had an uncle who had a radio business,
which gave him an opportunity to earn his first living in
electrical engineering. And I think later he and a brother--
I'm not exactly sure what the relationship was, but there
was one other person, also, with Dibner who was involved in
Bern Dibner 's beginning in electrical manufacture. They
started a very small business.

Bern Dibner decided quite early that the field which
had the greatest possibilities for advancement, the greatest
possibility for widespread utilization in all fields of
electricity, was electrical connectors. So he proceeded to

310

study all the types of electrical connectors that were
known, and he specialized in them. It would seem strange
that anything so insignificant as what connected two
electrical wires could become that important, but every
time you look up at an overhead power line, you see
that the wires are at some point connected to each other
and that these connectors are very important, that the
connectors which are part of switches are essential and
must be able to bear the surges of the current, must be
able to maintain a constant flow between the two bodies
that they're connecting. And so he studied this and
acquired patents and developed patents and built up what
became Burndy Engineering.

Now, Elmer Belt first heard that there was a man in
New York who was competing with him in buying books on
Leonardo sometime about 1942 or '43, and so he wrote to
this man and said he would like to meet him. And the man
said, well, he was very busy, and it would be rather
difficult, but if he would come out to see him at his
factory, he could spare some time to him. So Elmer went
out, and he found that this man that he met had a security
guard with him at all times. He was admitted to this
place with great care being taken to check him in and out,
to make sure that there were no questions asked or no
discussion of what this man was doing. When Elmer Belt

311

asked to see the books, the man took hiin out to a ware-
house and showed him a pile of boxes and said, "This is
my library. And until the war's over, I'm not able to
look at them, and I can't show them to you or even see
them myself." It was only afterward that Elmer learned
that Bern Dibner was involved in a very essential part
of the war, top secret development of proximity fuses
and other ordnance. Bern Dibner, at the end of the war,
went over as part of an inspection team to assess the
effectiveness of various war measures, such things as
saturation bombing and things like that, to try to
determine whether they really were worth the money and
effort that were put behind them, or whether they were
superfluous and overkill.

After the war, Bern Dibner did unpack his library,
and when he set up his plant in Norwalk, Connecticut,
he incorporated his library as a separate entity and set
it up as sort of a nonprofit institution into which he
poured a certain amount of the money which he was earning
from his busienss. But his library was distributed through-
out his research plant at Norwalk, Connecticut, the first
time I met him. Over in one section, he had all his books
about Volta; in another consultation room, he had all of
the books about Einstein; and in another room, he had all
his Curie books and materials. This, he felt, would serve

312

as an inspiration to the engineers working in the place,
[laughter]

He and his wife had decided very early that the
first time they were $1,000 ahead, they were not going
to devote every day of every year pursuing the dollar
and tending to business. As soon as they had $1,000,
they decided they were going to go to Europe and travel;
learn about the cities of Europe. In the course of
traveling and very seriously studying the places they
went and the languages of the countries which they visited,
they went to the bookshops, and Bern Dibner developed a
network of friendships with booksellers in all parts of
Europe. So there is no bookshop that you could go to
that might in any way have any book dealing with the
history of science, or any of the sciences, that he is
not known in. He had a capacity for making friends with
booksellers, and he was not a hard bargainer. He encour-
aged booksellers. He expected them to make a living,
and he paid fairly for what he bought. And as time went
on, his visits were looked forward to. The booksellers
would accumulate the best things and hold them until he
came, and as a result of that, he got a great many good
books which he might not otherwise have gotten. Many
people, such as one man, A. Bader in Geneva, sold him
things which he had inherited, collections of letters

313

from Volta and Galvani and Deluc, who was an early
forebear of Bader's. He sold Dibner electrical machines
which were heirlooms and really extraordinarily fine
examples of the early electrical generators which were
used for conducting electrical experiments and teaching
the electrical sciences.

And it was the same with me: Bern Dibner came to
see me, and he was warm, he was friendly, he would never
go away without buying something. And he encouraged me
to write him and offer him things. When he started to
develop his list, which he called "Heralds of Science,"
which was a list of the outstanding books in all the
sciences, he solicited the opinion of the notable sci-
entists in the various fields, he solicited the opinions
of the collectors in these fields, and he solicited the
opinions of booksellers. And when he got together his
material and published his work, he dedicated it to the
booksellers of the world who'd helped him form his col-
lection. His list, the "Heralds of Science," has become
a standard guide to the outstanding books in the sciences-
much more so than the [Harrison D.] Horblit list, which
was much more handsomely published and which contained
a great deal many more mistakes and contradictions, but
which has, for some people, become a great list because
it was called the Grolier Club List of a Hundred Books on

314

the History of Sciences .

Bern Dibner, as an example, heard that Herbert
Evans was likely to sell one of his collections. It
was the second collection that Herbert had formed; the
first collection had gone to Mrs. Evans when they were
divorced because it very rightly belonged to her. Most
of the money which had been spent on buying it had come
from Mrs. Evans, but it remained in Herbert Evans's
custody until it was sold, and I purchased that collection
for Lessing Rosenwald. That first collection, I must say,
had some unique books, some very fine copies of things
which never occur again in any of the Evans collections.
This collection was purchased by me for Lessing Rosenwald,
who gave it to the Institute for Advanced Study, and it
is the collection which forms the foundation of their
History of Science Library at Princeton.

GARDNER: This brings up an interesting question for me,
before you continue, and then I'll try to get you back
to your train of thought. With the number of customers
that you had who were interested in similar items and
subjects, how did you select those customers which would
receive which item? Do you see what I mean? There must
have been great competition.

ZEITLIN: Well, that was a valuable privilege. It gave
me a great advantage.

315

GARDNER: But there must have been great competition

also among your buyers.

ZEITLIN: Well, there was some competition. Naturally,

the ones that treated me the most kindly got the preference.

If they bargained too hard or kept the books too long

before giving me a decision, or tried to force me to

take back books of which they had purchased better copies

later on, I sort of put them last on the list. It was a

privilege which I had earned.

Naturally, Bern Dibner won a very high place on my
list very early, because when he heard about the second
Evans collection, he encouraged me to buy it. He said,
"I'll tell you what I will do. I Vi7ill give you a list of
approximately 100 books I want out of that collection and
I will advance you $10,000 towards your cost of purchasing.
And when you have bought it, take the books that are on my
list, check them over, price them, and send them to me.
And whatever you say is the right price, you can charge
against the $10,000 which I've advanced. When we've passed
the $10,000, keep on sending the books that I want, and
we'll go on from there — I'll pay you for them." This
enabled me to buy a collection which I could have never
bought with my own money. I was able to buy this collection
also with the help of John Valentine and Justin Turner, who
advanced the rest of the money. The total cost was $27,000.

316

I had only enough money to pay my fare to San
Francisco and Berkeley, where Herbert Evans lived. I'd
heard that Herbert Evans was of a mind to sell his col-
lection, so I called him up one Saturday and said, "I
would like to come up tomorrow morning and talk to you
about your collection." So I went up. I had already
discussed this list of what was in Herbert's library with
Irwin Rosenthal and his son Barney, and they were of a
mind to participate with me in buying it. VJe had concluded
that we could afford to pay about $27,000 for the col-
lection. I went to Herbert Evans, and I said, "I will
give you $27,000 for the collection. I will write you a
check for $5,000 now, and I will give you the balance when
the books have all been checked out against your list and
are packed and have left your house for the library in
the Life Sciences Building at Berkeley." And Herbert said,
"Well, I must think it over. I must talk to my wife, but
I will let you know tomorrow morning." The next morning
he said, "We'll take you up."

The collectors and dealers in the East heard about it.
People like Dave Randall of Scribner's said, "How did you
get Herbert Evans to sell you his collection?" And I
said, "Well, you know you've mentioned a number of times
to him that you would like to buy it, and a number of
other people have, but I did one thing more: I offered him

317

money." [laughter] This was the clincher: the fact
that I had found Dr. Evans at one of the points, which
he had reached a number of times during his life, where
he had bought more books than he could pay for. He
had developed this fine collection, but he owed the
banks money, and he owed the booksellers all over the
world money. Dunning letters were coming in and threats
of suits, and people were writing [Robert Gordon] Sproul,
the president of the University of California, and Evans
had to do something. The thing that he needed was someone
who would come forward and say, "I will give you so much
money down, and I will pay you the rest at such and such
a time . "

With the $10,000 that Bern Dibner had advanced and
the additional money which John Valentine and Justin
Turner lent me, I was able to buy the collection, and
that gave me my start as a dealer with a significant
stock of books in the history of science. I was able
to get out two very fine catalogs, catalogs which were
landmarks in that they contained a great many important
books in the history of science, all of them fine copies
or association copies. And there was no one else, cer-
tainly, in the United States, and only one or two people
in Europe, who'd ever gotten out catalogs to compare
with these. This gave me an immediate reputation. Of

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course, all of this was premised by the fact that Bern

Dibner had advanced $10,000 with which I could buy the

collection.

GARDNER: So what you did basically was: he advanced

the $10,000 for certain of the titles, and the rest of

the titles you maintained for yourself.

ZEITLIN: So I proceeded to price them, and he never

questioned any price I put on anything. I tried to be

very fair and price them below the market in his case,

because I wanted him to be happy. I felt I owed it.

The benefits of having advanced the money considered

that he was a partner in the enterprise, so he gained

a lot of very fine books at what now are very low prices,

GARDNER
ZEITLIN
GARDNER
ZEITLIN

What year was that, about?

That was 1955.

In 1955, that late!

Yes, and I had this opportunity to sell all
these books and to produce a catalog that gave me a
reputation, that gave me entree to a great many other
collectors and made my credit good with a lot of impor-
tant dealers in Europe. So that when I walked into a
bookstore and presented my card, I was immediately
recognized as the man who got out those catalogs. And
I must say that they were very well annotated. I had
a good man working with me, John B. Lee, and he and I
worked very hard to produce good catalogs. I think I

319

can honestly claim that the annotations were not just
superficial, that they were based upon a considerable
amount of study of the books themselves and the books
about the books.

GARDNER: Had Evans done any cataloging of his own?
ZEITLIN: Well, Evans was a discriminating accumulator.
He loved the chase. He appreciated what the books
meant, and he also canvassed a great many of the author-
itative men. He wrote to some of the outstanding
geologists around the world and asked them what, in their
opinions, were the significant works in, say, geology.
He did the same thing with the physicists and the chemists
and the botanists and so on. Out of that he compiled a
search list and went to work, after he'd compiled this
list, to find the best possible copies of the books. In
1937 he held an exhibition of outstanding books in the
history of science, for which he published a little cata-
log that was printed by the University of California
Press, and that catalog is still the best guide to the
significant books in the history of sciences. It sold
for something like thirty-five cents, and Ernst Weil in
later years, when he reviewed the Horblit book which was
selling for $100, implied that the Evans publication was
a better book.
GARDNER: I'm intrigued by one other thing, before we get

320

back to Bern Dibner. We've talked about four collectors,
basically, in the last couple of sessions--Frank Hogan
and Herbert Evans, Elmer Belt and Dibner. Two of them,
Dibner and Belt, apparently maintained their wealth
through the years; yet both Evans and Hogan found them-
selves strapped by their book purchases. Is that common?
ZEITLIN: Hogan was not strapped by his purchases.
GARDNER: He overbought, though.

ZEITLIN: Well, he overbought in terms of his capacity
to pay immediately; but he didn't overbuy in the long
run, because Hogan's fees were immense. He had very
high retainers. I think that he got a million dollars
for defending Andy Mellon.

GARDNER: Oh. Well, so there was no problem.
ZEITLIN: No, he did not die a poor man.
GARDNER: But is it common for book collectors? As you
mentioned, it's common for bookdealers to do that.
ZEITLIN: Herbert Evans did not die a poor man either.
GARDNER: No, no, no, that's not what I mean. But is
it common for book collectors to overextend themselves
in the course of buying?

ZEITLIN: Well, it is. A book collector will temporarily
overextend himself. He will buy more than he can pay
for, and booksellers have to be careful to curb some of
these men, because what is a pleasure can become a burden
and can be spoiled. A man who is an enthusiastic collector

321

can be turned into a disappointed, unhappy man if he
finds himself being driven by too much buying and
being unable to pay. And if his creditors get on his
back and press him, he is in trouble. It has happened
that some collectors have had to sell their books at
auction. Herbert Evans was chronically in debt — he
overbought--but in the long run, he did not lose money
by his collecting. His passion for collecting books
outran his practicality. He could have done a lot
better with selling the books that he bought; his col-
lections were all sold too far below what they could
have brought him. Warren Howell and I together sold
several of his collections, and in no case did we get
as much as might have been gotten for them if he hadn't
been in urgent need of money.

GARDNER: Well, shall we return to Bern Dibner, then,
and hear the rest of his story?

ZEITLIN: Well, Bern Dibner ' s backing of me in the
purchase of the Evans collection was certainly very
important in my development as a bookseller and my
becoming established as a dealer in books in the history
of science. We have maintained a constant correspondence,
and over the years, I visit him and he visits me. I
remember his coming out here once when the Red Cars were
still running. He called me up--it was on a Sunday--and

322

he said he would like to come and see me if I wasn't
busy and had time to take him over to my shop. This must
have been about 19 50. So he took the Red Car from
downtown — from the Biltmore Hotel, I guess it was then —
and he rode it out to Santa Monica and La Cienega
Boulevard, where I met him. We went down to my shop,
and we spent a very pleasant half-day there, looking at
books and talking. I said, "Why don't you take a taxi?
You can get back to your hotel so much faster. It took
you at least an hour to get here." And he said, "You
know, if I spent that money on taxis I wouldn't have as
much to buy books. Besides, I wouldn't have as much
time to read as I have when I'm riding on streetcars."
He was always a man without ostentation, and no matter
how powerful he has become, he has never lost his modesty
nor his ability to live in terms of very modest personal
needs. We traveled together with the Grolier Club on a
couple of occasions and spent a great deal of time with
each other, and he and his wife were very considerate,
never complained, never grumbled. If the regular meals
which were promised couldn't be delivered to us, and we
were given a box lunch with an apple and a sandwich, he
could sit down and enjoy it with just as much relish as
he could the best dinner in the finest restaurants of
Europe. I don't think anyone who's been associated with

323

Bern Dibner ever was made to feel that this was a man
with the kind of wealth and power which enabled him
to travel by his own private jet around the country
if he wanted to. He has always driven his own car.
He never has had anybody waiting on him.

He has built a library in Norwalk to house his
collection, a very attractive building; and lectures,
seminars, and meetings of various societies are held
there. He has very attractive exhibits of electrical
instruments, in addition to portraits and prints having
to do with the history of electricity. In addition to
the various fields of the history of science, he has
emphasized particularly, of course, the history of
electricity. And he bought a great many books of the
fifteenth century; he has formed a very substantial col-
lection--! think approximately 400--of books printed
before 1501. As a private collection in our time it is
certainly outstanding. It has been his idea to make
this an endowed library to be continued in perpetuity.

I must stop here to say something about the collec-
tion of instruments which is in his library. It's to
be seen in alcoves and on shelves and in niches all
over the library, and this is a collection of electrical
instruments of all types, dating from the beginning of
the Voltaic battery and the electrical friction generator,

324

I had been told by a customer of mine that an antique
dealer in New Orleans had bought an electrical museum
which had gone bankrupt in Holland. For some reason
the Dutch hadn't wanted to spend the money to support
this museum, and it finally went broke, and the thing
was auctioned off. The majority of the stuff was all
bought by an antique dealer in New Orleans who had it
in his place and whose idea was that people would buy
it for bases for lamps (the great vogue of sewing
machines that looked like lampstands and lampstands
that looked like sewing machines was going strong) .
But he decided that before he broke up the collection,
he'd see if he couldn't find a buyer for it all in one
lot. He had written to a customer of mine (whose name
I've forgotten right now), a man who lived in Santa
Barbara, and the man in turn had mentioned this offer
to me and said he wasn't interested, and he gave me
the name of that man in New Orleans. So I called up the
man in New Orleans and said, "I'd like to know about
your collection. How much do you want for it, and what
does it contain?" And the man said, "Well, I'll tell
you, I can't offer it to you now because I have promised
to give somebody in New England (a man by the name of
Lincoln who was trying to start an electrical museum up
in New England) first refusal, and he's trying to get

325

the money together right now. But if he doesn't buy
it, I'll let you know. The price of it is $5,000."
And I said, "Fine, I'd be interested." So about three
weeks later, I got a call from this man, and he said,
"Well, the collection is yours if you want it." And
I said, "May I have a few days? Since you've taken
this long, may I have a few days? I've got to get
together my nickels." And he said, "Yes, you've got
an option on this for ten days." And I said, "All
right."

The next day I had a phone call from Bern Dibner,
and he said, "What are you doing, trying to buy that
electrical collection?" I said, "I don't see any
reason why I can't buy it just as well as anyone else."
He said, "I understand you have an option on it." I
said, "Yes." "Well," he said, "I thought that this
man Lincoln v/as going to buy it, and that's why I didn't
get into the act. And between the time that he found he
couldn't buy it, and the time I got back to this man,
and the time he told me so, I found that you have an
option!" He said, "I know how much you've been asked to
pay. How much will you take to get out?" And I said,
"I think $7,500 — I'll take a $2,500 profit." He said,
"All right, I'll mail you a check and all you have to do
is tell those people in New Orleans that you've turned

326

over your option to me."

So he bought the collection, and I never saw it
until about three or four years later, when I went to
his place in Connecticut. Here were all these beauti-
ful instruments, an enormous collection of them, all
varieties of early electrical generators and storage
batteries, and so on. And I said, "You know, it's a
good thing I didn't see this collection before I took
your proposition, or it would have cost you a hell of
a lot more. You got a great bargain!" [laughter]
He said, "Yes, I know I did. It is a great bargain,
and I'm very grateful to you for letting me have it."
That is the kind of man Dibner is. Now, you might say
with the kind of money he's got, it was easy for him to
be generous, but that's not usually true. Generally,
the men who come up the hard way like he did, and who
are used to moving around the world and making deals,
are not very generous; they are the hardest bargainers
of all. But he is truly an exception. In the course
of the years, we've met at meetings of the History of
Science Society. Our first meeting was 1956, in Florence,
where we traveled together on the train to Milan and had
a wonderful time. And from then on, over the years, we
have met many times--Josephine and I and he and his
beautiful wife, Billie. I have enjoyed trips together

327

with them and Ladislao Reti and his wife, Chiquita, and Elmer

and Ruth Belt. It has been a wonderful association

and friendship.

GARDNER: He is still alive, I take it.

ZEITLIN: He is still alive, yes. He is over eighty,

and he has been honored in many different ways. The most

important thing, I think, that's happened to his collection

I was also involved with, and that is the presentation of

it to the Smithsonian [Institution] .

GARDNER: There's about two more minutes on the tape.

ZEITLIN: Two more minutes. Well, I think that this will

have to wait till next time. I think one of the most

important gifts the Smithsonian ever received was the

Burndy Library, and it was I who went to him on behalf of

the Smithsonian and asked him to consider their proposal

to take it over, subject to certain conditions v.'hich I

helped draw up.

GARDNER: Okay, you'd like to wait till next time to finish.

ZEITLIN: I think it v;ould be best to wait until next time.

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